
, ." -^ BY t^ - ^ 



[John de Praine 




Class 
Book 



Vv.r 



DOBEU COLLECTION 



LECTMES AND ADDRESSES 



BY 



JOHN DE FRAINE. 



-^&3it^^^*^^- 



ObtaniaLlo from tlie AUTHOR, at lils Rosiaonca, 
White IIall, "WEbX Wi(KiiA^r, 

C A :N£ 13 RI 13 a- 1'. s tc I K E. 

3?RiXTED BY Tno:\iAS TOi"rs, :\rAT;iv!"r itrLi, cami'.ridge. 






205449 
'13 



Not only to keep clown the base in man, 
But teach high thought, and amiable words 
And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 
And love of truth, and all that makes a man," 



S H A M S 



^ DO not say I am not mistaken, but for a 
^ very long time I liave thought that some 
Y of our modern shams are doing more 
than anything else to warp us from what 
Tennyson most beautifully calls '' the living 
truth," and to eat away the manliness and 
the wom.anliness of the common j^eople. When I 
think of the foppery and affectation — the apery and 
pretence — the white-washed respectability — how 
people pinch and screw merely to appear genteel — 
how servant girls spend every penny they earn on 
finery and vanity — how many of our young men 
prefer a brass ring on their fingers and a bad 
cigar in their mouth, to naturalness in their 
manners and common sense in their brains — how 
we worship the full purse — how modest merit often 
gets kicked into the gutter — how Ave do not care 
if the platter be clean outside, though inwardly it 
should be full of all m.anuer of foulness and leprousy 
— and seeing all these things, I think a voice conies 
to those men, who aspire to Ijc public or private 



R SJfAMS. 

toaclicrs, niul tlic voice says: Cry aloud, expose 
tlicsowoakncssos, donoiinpo these shams, say a word 
for lionost Avorth, teacli the people to hate false- 
hood, retiiie their sense of honour, speak for the 
tender sanctities of home — for love and virtue — so 
that their voices may he heard in gentle i-livtlim 
or in solemn cadence, making music all day 
lonii', teachinii,' us — prince or peasant, })lough- 
man or l)o(^t, loftv genius or lowly plodder, pro- 
claimer from the ])ulpit or opener merely of the 
})e"\v doors — that righteousness ah me can exalt a 
nation, and that here t(jo, in our daily life, the 
truth alone can make men hrave and free I 

There's a gospel in these days, not according 
to the four Kvangel'sts, hut according to Mrs. 
Grundy. The highest ambition is to show olf. 
Every Smith wants to astonish the l^jiowns, and 
every Jones to out-do the Ivohinsons. 

•■ AVe cat, au<I driulc, and diiio, and plud, 

And yo to clinrc'h on Sunduv ; 

And many are afraid of Crod, 

But many more of !Mrs. Grundy." 
There's a sham called " Keeping up ap])earances.'' 
It has brought in the age of brass-, and lacker, and 
a barrow load of Brunnnagem jewelery for a live 
pound note. It's the father of moral stucco, and 
of much gilding to A'ery sorry and A'cry inferior 
gingerbread. Of course Ave are constantly taken 
in, and there's a good deal of rough, healthy 
common sense in the story of the two negroes. 
''Sambo, Avhere you get dat Avatch from I see you 
wear at meeting last Sunday?" " IIoav you knoAV 
I hab a Avatcli nigger?" "Cause I see de chain 
hang out — cause I see de chain hang out." '' Get 
out o' de Avay Avay, nigger ; get out o' de way. 
If ye Avas to see a halter round my neck should 
xou tink dere Avas a horse inside ob me ? " But 



S&AMS. 9 

then you know some persons will seem. We had a 
man in my native town who walked ten miles full 
north to borrow a horse to ride five miles full south. 
These persons are always panting to play the big 
fiddle. Life with them is one long struggle, and 
that is the old struggle of the frog trying to swell 
itself to the dimensions of an ox. I was staying 
some years ago with a most excellent clergyman, 
in Durham county, and he told me that on© 
morning, when he stood on the lawn in front of his 
house, he saw coming up one of the gravel paths a 
very showily dressed young lady. He was near- 
sighted, and could'nt tell who it was ; but he raised 
his hat immediately ; and then the young lady said : 
" It's only me, if you please, sir ; it's nobody but 
me, if you please, sir ; it's only Sarah, if you please, 
sir ! " Oh, my dear friends, accustomed to get 
nervous in the presence of some of our modern 
gentility, that jumps up, like a mushroom in a 
night — nobody knows from whence— don't, if you 
please. It is'nt the big fiddle they're playing ; it's 
only a twopenny ha'penny trumpet of their own 
petty invention. It isn't an ox ; it's only a human 
frog, puffed up with a parish beadle kind of dignity. 
It isn't my lady, gracious in manners^ refined in 
mind, noble in mien; '^it's only me, if you please, 
sir; it'« nobody but me, if you please, sir; it's only 
Sarah, if you please, sir ! " When I was a boy at 
school how these shams puzzled me. I thought it 
was a sham when the landlady of the ^' Blue Duck " 
bought in a ricketty pianoforte, and set her 
youngest daughter, of nine-and-twenty, to learn to 
play, because she was about to marry a dandyfied 
young tobacconist, who wore five rings on his little 
finger, and was master of an establishment, con- 
sisting of two rooms and a commodious attic ! I 
thought it was a sham when the great little folk 



iO SEAMS. 

gave tliemselves airs — Avoiild be leaders — said : ^' I 
nm Sir Oracle, and when I ope my moutli let no 
little dog ever presume to bark " — wlio were stuck 
up with pride, and, unfortunatel}^, knocked do"^TLi 
by poverty ; and who, very likely, had all the 
elements of fine ladies and gentlemen, except two 
very important ones, namely, the means and the 
manners ; — said individuals always reminding me 
of good Adam Clarke's story of the man who wrote 
his own autobiography, and there were so many I's 
in it, they had to send a printer's man round with 
a wheelbarrow to collect I's from all the people in 
the county. But what are you in these days 
unless you can cut a dash ? Here's all the world 
dying for show and shine. People who can afford 
honest pewter must have nickel silver to-morrow 
morning, though they should run into debt for it ; 
folk who might drive to market in a gig, and pay 
for that, want next week to start a brougham, and 
get somebody else to pay for it ; those who might 
give you home-brew'd or ''sweet, caller water," 
prefer poisoning you with what the newspapers 
every morning call " a rich flavoured and very full- 
bodied Port, at one and threepence ha'penny a 
bottle." Your errand boy must do the grand on 
Sundays, and must have a cane in his hand, a 
penny cigar in his mouth, and a brass ring on his 
finger ; the lady who bought old rags in Frying- 
pan Lane yesterday will be down at Ramsgate 
to-morrow, resplendent in red satin and purple 
velvet ; and your green-grocer's wife, round the 
corner, will be at church or chapel next Sunday, in 
magenta and blue watered silk ; servant maids, 
who ought to be thinking about the Post Office 
Savings Bank, will be thinking about three-farthing 
bits of finery ; and servant maids' mistresses — who 
ought to know better, seeing that life is so short. 



SHAMS. n 

and the art of it so difficult to learn — will spend 
the days as they flit by in playing at moral bo-peep 
with Mrs. Grundy, and keeping w^ the old, sad, 
and mad struggle of trying to dress a little better 
and look a little better than their next-door neigh- 
bour. So have I seen worthy success marred by 
unworthy ways. Tabbs, the retired tallow chan- 
dler, and Boggs, the ex-tinman, treating with 
disdain the very class from which they had risen, 
and leading their children to vulgar affectation and 
genteel tom-foolery. Rather than that, give me 
the noble spirit of the noble Lord Chief Justice 
Tenterden, when he took his son in front of the 
poor barber's shop at Canterbury, and, with glow- 
ing pride, showed him the place where his grand- 
father had once shaved for a penny. When 
Andrew Johnson, a late President of America, was 
delivering a speech, a fool in the crowd (who had 
put his brains into a quart pot, and left them there, 
as fools are apt to do in my day), cried out that 
Johnson, who was delivering the speech, ''had 
once been a tailor ; " to which Johnson replied : 
"Gentlemen, the man speaks truth; but when I 
was a tailor I was said to be the best stitcher in 
the town ! " Ladies and gentlemen, don't come 
here to-night to tell me what a man has been; 
come and tell me what he is. If he has conquered 
an adverse fate ; if he has borne the blows and 
broken the bars of evil circumstance ; if he has 
mastered the defects of early education ; if he has 
triumphed over cruel wrong ; if he has lived down 
the sorrow and defeat of bygone years ; if, above 
the ashes of a wasted and ruined past, he has risen 
to newness of life ; and, taking his pooi five talents, 
has by toil, and tears, and righteousness, and 
bravery in these common days, added other five 
to them, and given God the glory — honour that 



T2r SEAMS. 

man wherever you may find him, for it is such as 
he Avho will strengthen this nation, and make this 
old England more than ever the land of the brave 
and the free. 

But you will never get this till you get rid of 
your sham men. Fanny Fern says she walked 
down a street in Boston, in America, and she 
looked in a shoemaker's window, and there she saw 
a piece of card board, with the words j^rinted on it : 

''Men Wanted." 
'' Ah," she says, " they are wanted ! " There are 
plenty of spurious imitations in the market, and in 
these days of innumerable shams, tell me if we 
have'nt got plenty of sham men ? Some of them 
low, coarse, brutal, unmannerly, given up to the 
beershop and their own dirty and contemptible 
selfishness ; some of them dwarfed with conceit^ 
who tell you they live in the nineteenth century, 
when there is the march of intellect and the culti- 
vation of fine ideas ; who tell you they know 
what's what, and that they are up to a thing 
or two ; who look upon everybody in years as 
a fool, or a fogey, or a buffer; and who 
think they themselves are the men, and that 
wisdom will die with them. Oh, its no doubt 
very wonderful what some of our young men know, 
but in all probability its a great deal more- 
wonderful what they don't know. Boys of sixteen 
thinking themselves too old to be in leading 
strings — fancying it rather manly to be cheeky, 
and talk slang, and stick a short pipe in their 
mouths. I don't blame the boys altogether for 
that ; I blame their parents that they don't break 
the jDipes, and send such precocity to bed, and keep 
it there till it has learnt better behaviour. Then, 
in the large towns and cities especially, we have 
the electro-plated and highly gilded young gentle- 



SMAMS. 13 

meiiy who wear such flash jewelery, and talk so 
loud, and dress so large ; and if I meet them 
accidentally in omnibus or railway carriage, they 
affect to be sprigs of the aristocracy, when they 
are only junior clerks at a pill shop round the 
corner, and niasters of the aristocratic income of 
sixteen shillings and six pence a week. The 
electro-plated and highly gilded young gentlemen, 
who were never guilty of a thought in life, 
and most likely never will be, beyond the 
cut of their coat and the shape of their 
whiskers ; and who, when both the tailor and 
barber have done with them, bear often a strong 
resemblance to a Cochin China fowl, and would'nt 
make bad general scare-crows. Against all these 
shams, what should be the cry of pulpit and plat- 
form teachers ; what should be the cry of all those 
who desire the elevation of human kind, but just 
this : — " Give us men ! give us men ! rough and 
rugged, if needs be ; the hand hard and horny, and 
the fingers crooked with daily toil, if only the 
heart be sound and the life be very brave and pure. 
Give us men ! like that blacksmith Longfellow sing* 
to us about, who each morning saw some work 
begin, each evening seeing it close. Give us men I 
like that Miller of Dee, who stood up before the 
King, and sang : — 

"I love my wife, I love my friend, 

I love my little cMLdren tkree ; 

I owe no penny I cannot pay; 

I thank the river Dee, 

That ttu'ns the mill, that grinds the corn,. 

To feed my bahes and me." 
Give us men ! diligent in business, honest at the 
counter, upright in factories, faithful in senate 
houses, earnest in the pulpit. Give us men I 



14 SHAMS. 

ennobled by character, by magnanimous courage, 
by unsullied fame, by lofty integrity, by loftier 
faith in truth, and trust in God and His dear Son. 
"What care I how rich you be? 

I love you if your thoughts are pure. 

Wliat signifies yoiu* poverty 

If you can suffer and endure ? 

'Tis not the birds that make the si)rinj, 

Nor yet the crown that makes the king ; 

If you are wise, and good, and just, 

You've riches better than all other ; 

Give me your hand, you shall, you must, 

I love you as a brother." 
That leads me to an entirely different kind of sham, 
and it is this : — If I take u^d a local newspaper, and 
run my eyes doTvai the columns, I shall come to 
what I think is going to turn out a remarkably 
edifying and instructive bit of business. So I read 
as follows: — ''The age in which we live is dis- 
tinguished for its enquiring spirit — knowledge is 
the pioneer of civilization — science confers bless- 
ings upon the human family ; but of all modern 
inventions, the greatest is Snoggings' and Groggins' 
Edumdidumdo, or Patent Varnish for Leather 
Horse Collars." One of the most original puffs of 
that kind I ever met with, I found in the Leeds 
Mercury when I was down in Yorkshire lectm-ing 
some years ago. Every morning for a week this 
advertisement appeared : — " X. L. will deliver an 
Oration on ' Humbug,' at the Pudsey Institution. 
Admission Free. N.B. — Briggs's Patent Starch." 
They stopped the advertisement for a few days, 
then this appeared : — " The Committee of the 
Pusdsey Institution return their heart-felt thanks to 
X. L. for his spirit-stirring lecture, delivered last 
night, at which all the ladies of the neighbourhood 
unaniuKjusly resolved that they would henceforward 



SEAMS. 15 

and for ever use only Briggs's Patent Starch." 
Pray look down the advertisement sheet for a study 
of shams. Here's a fortune for twelve stamps — 
French in a fortnight for eighteen pence — German, 
without a master, for half-a-crown, in three weeks — 
short cuts to knowledge, and much shorter ones to 
wealth and renown. A friend of mine saw an 
advertisement in a paper, which stated that any 
person forwarding five shillings to a certain 
address should get a receipt for making two guineas 
a week. My friend put sixty penny stamps into an 
envelope, and got this for reply: — ''Get twelve 
potatoes — wash them — par-boil them — ^roast them — 
put them into a clean piece of flannel ; then into a 
basket — go into the streets on cold, frosty nights, 
and if you can sell enough of them you'll make two 
guineas a week." Pray keep to the advertisement 
sheet. Here's seventy-five per cent, for all money 
invested in the Royal Cornish Tinky Te Mines. 
Any person forwarding two hundred pounds im- 
mediately to the '' Imperial Egg-shell and Cabbage- 
stem, or Diddle-the-money-out-of-your-pocket Com- 
pany," may secure a permanent income for life. 
Pills warranted to cure every ill to which flesh is 
heir ; extracts of Peach Blossom, much in request, 
for preserving fading beauty, and making the old 
look a great deal fresher than the young again; 
preparations for baldness, so effectual that a box 
having been rubbed into a barber's wooden block, 
it was discovered, in less than six weeks, to be 
covered with luxuriant and beautiful jet black hair. 
Oh, John Bull, when thou art deceived by such 
shams as these, John De Fraine says : great 
indeed is thy gullibility. But the cry of the age 
is for this nonsense. You can hardly get a thing 
to go down unless you give it a fine name. Here's 
the popular singer, whose real name, for anything 



16 SHAMS. 

I know to tlio contrary, may be Mary Stobbs or 
Sellna Dobbs, christens herself on flaming handbills 
all over the city, ^' The Madame Agelina Sophia 
Castaglioni Sepherina." Aspiring gentility gets 
into four-roomed cottages, and immediately calls 
them '' Lodges " and " Villas." Some of the names 
sadly belie themselves in town and comitry too. 
There's Paradise Row, where the folk are quarrel- 
ling and fighting from Monday mornino: till Satur- 
day night ; Orchard Lane, and you might walk 
seven miles straight through London without ever 
scenting an apple tree ; Prospect Place, the prospect 
in all probability being three dust heaps, and a 
brick wall nine feet high. Shops, nineteen feet by 
nine, are '' Emporiums; " a day school is a Young 
Ladies College ; the man who buys the rags and 
bones at the back door will bloom in the front 
street into a Marine Store Merchant ; a corn cutter 
is a Chiropodist ; a conjuror's j^latform a Psyche- 
mantheum. When I am in London I go down the 
busy thoroughfares of that most wonderful of all 
cities, to renew the olden lessons of my youth. 
There, round certain establishments of plate glass 
and polished mahogany, I saw the other day the 
same kind of crowd that I used to see seventeen 
and eighteen years ago. I looked up, and there 
were the old bills that had been re-posted and 
re-pasted so many times ; but they were always 
there — from top to bottom — from roof to floor, and 
all over the windows : — '' Selling ofl"! " '^ Must be 
cleared out in a few days ! " They were selling 
off at those places eighteen years ago, and, to my 
certain knowledge, have been doing it every hour 
down to the present one — '' At an alarming sacri- 
l&ce ! " ''At less than cost price!" Oh, what 
benevolent gentlemen these must be, who buy 
articles, wholesale, at fifteen shillings apiece, and 



SHAMS, 17 

then retail tliem over the counter to a confiding 
British public for exactly three half-crowns. Plate 
glass, polished mahogany, burnished brass, pendant 
chandelier ! My little children would go up from 
our Cambridgeshire village, and seeing these places 
lit up at night time, would think them homes and 
palaces of the fairies. Then I took up the Times 
newspaper, and there I read this letter: — Letter 
from Miss Ellen Barle}^, the Secretary of the 
Institution for Poor Needlewomen at Hinde Street, 
Manchester Square. '' Sir, — One of our poor 
women, broken down by care and want, applied 
yesterday for work at a noted selling-oif shop in the 
city. The manager gave her four holland coats 
to make. It took her seven hours unceasing work 
to make one coat, and the payment that poor 
creature received was twopence farthing." Exactly 
five weeks after that did I take up the Morning 
Standard now in existence, and the Morning Star 
then in existence, and there I read of a girl who 
had been as well educated as any young lady, who 
has kindly come here to listen to me to-night, and 
is now listening to me with such gracious and 
generous patience. She had been brought up in 
the home of an English gentleman, and had lost 
every friend in the world save one sister. They 
were reduced to direst poverty, and made shirts in 
that great world of London, for two shillings a 
dozen : dying one of them, at the early age of 
twenty-four^ in youth and beauty, of starvation. 
A room, the Morning Standard said, witli no 
furniture in it, save a borrowed broken chair, a 
rotten piece of oil cloth on the floor — a sick sister 
in one corner, and a dead one in the other. Yes ! 
run to and fro, and vex your brains with shallow, 
wire-drawn hobbies in social science ; but tell me 
how much sweat of life and limb it takes to pay for 
c 



18 SHAMS. 

some of tlie plate glass, and to light up some of 
the dangling- chandeliers. Oh, where's poor Tom 
Hood — sleeping under the spired grass in Kensal 
Green, with the stars shining in their olden and 
solemn splendour above his dust, as I saw them 
shining above my head when I walked to this 
hall — to sing as only he could sing : — 
" Oh, men with sisters dear, 

Oh, men "with mothers and wives ; 

It is not linen you're wearing out, 

But human creatures' lives. 

Stitch, stitch, stitch ! 

In poverty, hunger, and dirt, 

Sewing at once, with a double thi'ead, 

A shroud as well as a shirt ! 

But why do I talk of death, 

That phantom of grisly bone ! 

I hardly fear his terrible shape, 

It seems so like my own; 

It seems so like my own 

Because of the fasts I keep, 

God that bread should be so dear, 

And flesh and blood so cheap." 
Then there's another Sham, and I have called 
that the Sensation Shams. We live in the day of 
sensation novelists, sensation politicians, sensation 
reformers, and I am sorry to be obliged to add, in 
some places, sensation preachers of the Gospel. The 
popular novel if you want it to go into seA^enteen 
editions in as many weeks, inust contain an account 
of half-a-dozen murders, and before you have read 
seventy pages, give a graphic and refreshing de- 
scription, of nearly twenty persons, who have either 
hung themselves or cut their throats. The gentlemen 
who draw crowds to the Assembly Rooms and the 
Music Halls are Ceiling Flyers, Nigger Singers, 



SHAMS. 19 

Perfect Cures, Giants nineteen feet high, Dwarfs 
that you put, man and wife, into your waistcoat 
pocket together, Performers who cook a pancake on 
a tight rope 160 feet in in the air. At a London 
Music Hall some time ago a man drew a crowd of 
persons, night after night, to hear him imitate the 
crows of a cock and the grunt of a pig. Lofty 
entertainment for an intellectual people ! And at 
Birmingham not long since a man was welcomed 
with vociferous applause in the singing of a song, 
the chorus and refrain of which ran : 
' ' I thiuk I have seen you before ; 

I fancy I've seen you before ; 

Your face seems to be quite familiar to me, 

I fancy I've seen you before." 
What do Secretaries of the local Literary and 
Mechanics' Institutions tell me ? I have lectured at 
a great number of Mechanics' Institutions all over 
the Kingdom, from Plymouth to Aberdeen, and 
what do the Secretaries everywhere say ? They 
say : '' Oh, Mr. De Fraine, when Professor Ridley- 
dinkum comes with the performing dogs and 
monkeys the place gets crowded to suffocation, and 
the people pay two shillings and three shillings for 
the front seats ; and when the gentlemen who black 
their faces come, and sing comic songs, and stand 
upon their heads, and turn themselves inside out, 
there's no lack of enthusiasm ; but if we engage a 
man to lecture upon Astronomy, or Chemistry, or 
Locomotion, or the Sciences, then the people 
dribble in by twos and threes, with faces nearly as 
long as a fiddle, and looking as if the Committee 
ought to be everlastingly obliged to them for being 
there at all." At the Crystal Palace you might 
get hundreds, probably, to hear readings from the 
sweetest, and tenderest, and noblest of modern 
poets ; but the next day you would get 47,000 



SUAAtS. 

present to sec the pancake cooked on the tight rope 
I have referred to, 150 feet in the air. A year or 
two ago a man perf(jrming on the high rope over- 
balanced himself, and fell into a net-work of cord 
and rope, prepared to receive him, through which 
he broke, and came down to the floor, thirty feet 
beneath, amidst the shrieks and the screams of the 
ladies who were present. But why were the ladies 
present ? And why should it be any more exciting 
to see a man on a rope 200 feet in the air than to 
see him on a rope two feet in the air, unless it be 
the prospect and the hope that the fellow will over- 
balance himself, and come down, and break his 
neck, amidst the shrieks and the screams of those 
who may happen to be present. 

Then there's another sham, and I call that the 
Talk Sham. ]\Iany years ago I remember seeing a 
late Lord Chancellor of England — the late Lord 
Wcstbury — when he was plain llichard Bethell, 
canvassing the free and independent electors of my 
native town, Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire ; and 
I remember seeing him in exquisite lavender kid 
gloves, that had just been taken from the box, shake 
hands with a di'unken chimney sweep, who had just 
been taken from the gutter, and I thought that was 
a sham. Oh, north-east wind ! you never blew 
louder than do some of our great agitators ; but 
by and bye if you put into their noisy, chattering 
mouths the soft, juicy sugar plums of office, then 
your wild, skittish animals, that no man could tame, 
will soon get broken to official harness, and bloom 
presently into the pliant, the ingenious, and the 
facile ministers. See what mere noise has done for 
what fine political speakers have been calling "the 
masses." I hear them shout on the Market Hill for 
liberty, and I know that some of them are prepared 
to knock down with their fists the first man who 



SHAKS. ■ 21 

differs from them. They call themselves financial 
reformers, and it's a positive fact that some of them 
could'nt give you change for a threepenny bit. They 
sit round the tap room fire and sing noisy songs 
about " The Roast Beef of Old England," and then 
go home to their own firesides and dine off the 
sirloin of a red herring ! Sensible fellows ! they can 
put my Lord Derby, and Earl Russell, and Mr. 
Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli to the rightabout in 
less than ten minutes, and they know more than all 
the legislators who ever passed through the door of 
St. Stephen's ; but they haven't learnt the philo- 
sophy of keeping clear of the pawn shop, or acquir- 
ing the money to buy a new pair of shoes with. 
Common sense, which I think is the most zmcommon 
of all sorts of sense in the world, says : — If you 
want the city to be decent teach every man to sweep 
his own doorway clean. If the people are for 
reform why don't they sometimes keep quiet and 
go home to be the reformers of their own manners, 
and the legislators for their own lives and 
their own firesides. There are such a lot of 
these talk shams. I always think it's a sham, 
on a small scale, when a boy tells me he pre- 
fers school to play, or " an angelically good little 
girl " would much rather take a four page tract than 
a juicy jam tart or a hot mince pie. I always think 
it's a sham when people sign petitions, as long as my 
arm, against running one train on Sunday, and at 
the same time persist in being driven twice to 
church, or three times to chapel in their own carriage. 
I always think it's a sham in Mrs. Bumbledon's par- 
lour or Mrs. Fizzigiggins's drawing room, when a 
lady of great beauty, and even greater talent, is 
entreated, nay begged of to advance to a certain 
instrument, and give forth delicious sounds ; and 
immediately the young lady begings to j)lay all the 



22 SIT A MS 

well-dressed, and well-belmvcd, and well-l)red people 
in the room connnence to cliatter so loudly that it's 
almost impossible to hear seventeen notes of the 
performance ; and immediately the young lady has 
finished they all break out into a chorus of : " Oh ! 
thank you, thank you, thank j^ou." That's because 
she's left oif I suppose. I always think it's a sham 
when we are so hard upon poor hungry Jack 
Spriggs for stealing a bunch of turnips and haven't 
got a word to say against gigantic rogues and big 
speculating STvindlers, who put up theii' fine houses 
and villas — paid for with the tears and cries of the 
fiitherless and ^\^do^^'s. I always think it's a sham 
when we come doT\ai with heavy blows upon poor, 
vain, ignorant Betty Perks, the servant maid, 
because she slipped out of the kitchen door with a 
gaudy ribbon and a flash bonnet on her head, and 
raise no voice against our great middle classes, so 
many of whom are choking the very generosities of 
life, running into debt and the banki'uptcy court, and 
ninepence three farthings in the pound, all through 
that mad and sad struggle, I said at the begin- 
ing, of trying to dress a little better, and look a little 
better than their next door neighbour. Ah ! the old 
fanners and merchants didn't live quite so high as 
the modern ones, but they didn't smash quite so 
often ! They usually dined at one o'clock instead of 
seven or eight, but they generally managed to 
pay twenty shillings in the 230und, a bit of business 
I understand that some fine folk find it very difficult 
to come up to in these days. There's a caj^ital 
thing in Hone's Ej^igrams about our old friends the 
farmers : In 1776 it was : 

" The man to the plougli, 
The wife to the cow, 
The girl to sew, 
The boy to mow, 
And your rents are sure to be netted." 



SSAMS. 23 

But in 1876 it is : 

" The test man Tally lio ! 

The girls piano ! 

The wife silk and satin ! 

The boys Grreek and Latin I 
And, if yon don't take care, yon'll all he gazetted."" 
In more than one sense there's power and meaning 
in those words. When Dr. Johnson was courting 
Mrs. Porter he thought he ought to be very honest 
with her and tell her all the circumstances of his 
family history, so he told her that he once had a 
relative hanged. She, to keep pace with him, said r 
" She had never had a relative hanged, but she had 
had fifty who deserved to be." I do not know whether 
the shams .and pretences, the false gentility and 
general tomfoolery with which the world is afflicted 
are likely to be kicked out of it, but for my part I 
am quite sure they deserve to be. Then there are 
the sham people who know everything, and I should 
like to know who can teach them anything. The 
sentimental young ladies and gentlemen who set up 
for critics before they have cut their wisdom teeth, 
and who can settle questions for you in five minutes 
that have baffled students and philosophers all 
down the ages, and who talk so much with chatter 
from the teeth outward, growing every day a great 
deal louder, and by no means much wiser, till you can 
only find a little relief in falling back upon Pope's 
comfortable assurance that ''fools rush in where 
angels fear to tread." There was a man in my 
native town who knew everytliing but one thing. 
He knew everything but what a fool he was — but 
everybody else knew that very well — so between him 
and his neighbours there was almost a monopoly of 
wisdom. I read a capital story the other day about 
a fine critic who always found fault with what other 
people praised. Walking arm in arm with a friend 



24 SEAMS. 

down the Broadway in New York they came to a 
bird ijreserver's Avindow where wa« an owl mounted 
on a perch. " There," said the Critic, " isn't it 
villanons, isn't it shameful, isn't it iniquitous, to 
think any man should profess to learn a business, 
should then stuif a bird, stick it on a perch, \mi it 
into a window, and want to palm it off upon the 
jmblic as being something like what it really was 
when it was alive." Just at that moment the owl 
happened to wink. It was a live one that had been 
put there that vcr}^ morning ; and that was a settler 
to that gentleman's criticism henceforward and for 
ever. 

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have called }'our 
attention to these few shams, not because I wished 
to take any disagreeal)le view of things — I trust I 
have not done that ; but I wanted in a lecture like 
this to point out, esj^ecially to young men, that ihQ 
only Avay for us to " ring out the false " is for you 
and I in our own life to "ring in the true." I 
wanted to show you that the philosopy and common 
sense of life is not for young peo})le to get above 
tlieii' position, but for them to do their duty bravely 
in every position. It isn't where we live, but how we 
live. It isn't what we do, but how we do it. It 
isn't what we have got on us, but what we have got 
in us. Not what people say about us, but what the 
Great and Good God knows about us. Dr. Arnold 
in his day tried to teach the young gentlemen of 
England never to do extraordinary things, but to do 
extraordinarily well the that which did lie close 
to them. Some time ago, in a little town in 
Essex, they started a Rifle Corps, and there 
were ninety-six officers and only fourteen men of 
the rank and file ! That arises from the fact 
that nearly everybody thinks himself cut out 
to be king and a captain among his fellows ; and 



SEAMS. 25 

when I was a little boy I used to think if my shoes 
were polished very brightly in front, it didn't matter 
though there was ever so much mud at the heel. 
That was because 1 couldn't see behind me. Now 
that I have grown to be a man, and gone much 
about this world, I meet with such a lot of 
persons — rich and poor alike — who are polishing to 
the greatest nicety the work that is going to be seen, 
heard, applauded ; but that which only the Eternal 
and never- slumbering eye of God sees they slur 
and do at their worst. But I have come with a 
message of cheer, for I have come to tell you we 
may all be like that shepherd boy and king of old, 
who, thousands of years ago, '' served his own 
generation according to the will of God and then 
fell on sleep." I sit back in express trains, at 
certain seasons of the year, nearly every day ; I 
have been doing this for the last eighteen years ; 
and I have looked out of the carriage windows in 
all weathers — fog — rain — sleet — shine — snow — and 
I have seen men holding points and working signals. 
"^ Oh, yes," you say, ''he's a pound a week fellow, 
and wears velveteen jacket, and carries dirt in his 
finger nails ; why bring him forward ? " To which 
I reply J " What's his business ? " '' Well, you have 
just said it ; it's to hold a point and work a signal." 
Yes, but if he hold the point right, and work the 
signal correctly, and do his duty, then you, and I, 
and fifty others go home to those who are watching 
and waiting for us, and who are as dear to us 
to-night as our own life ; but if he turn the point 
wrong, and err in the signal box, and entertain no 
solemn sense of his responsibility, then you, and I, 
and fifty others may go to death and destruction. 
And I say that upon the poorest and meanest work 
of life great issues hang. I call upon you to do 
yoiir duty ; to submit to all lionourable conditions ; 
n 



26 SHAMS. 

to triumph over temptations ; to remember that a 
penny well earned is better than a pound badly 
got ; and to step out into the world with clean 
hands and a brave heart, trusting alone in God for 
a friend and your daily bread. Some time ago I 
delivered a lecture to a very crowded audience in a 
little town in Hertfordshire ; and the next morning 
when I was walking down to the railway station, 
a man ran out of a draper's shop and said to me : 
'' Mr. De Fraine, I want to thank you for your 
lecture, because whenever you come here, you 
always put a better spirit into us, and make us happy 
in our work.'''' '' Happy in oui' work ! oh, sir," I 
said, *' here's half the world quarrelling with its 
work, fighting against its work, kicking against its 
work." Thankful to God shall I be, if the lectures 
I deliver from time to time, and from place to place, 
shall put a better spirit into men, and make them 
happy in their daily toil. Therefore have I come 
here to-night, to say : Go, soldier, to the tented 
field, or mariner, to the stormy sea, and be happy 
in thy daily work. Go, artizan, to the sooty 
forge — sallow student, poring over learned books — 
labourer, turning up straight furrows of the brown 
earth to the blue sky — and be happy in thy daily 
work. Go, O teachers of the young, speakers of 
eloquent words, preachers of immortal truth, and 
be happy in thy daily work. Go, thou rich, to 
lighten the way with a courtlier grace and a 
queenlier charity ; follow thou poor — "king only 
of two hands." 

" Both heirs to some six feet of sod, 
Both children of the same great God — 
Prove title to your heirship vast, 
By record of a ■well filled past ; 
A heritage, it seems to me, 
A king might die to hold in fee." 



SHAMS, '^1 

But is it a lecture on Shams? So the bills say; 
but I am going to speak of two realities. There 
are plenty of shams in the world, and a great deal 
too much make-believe ; but there are always two 
real things in our midst. There's real sin and real 
sorrow ; and say what you like, but I think it's the 
business of every earnest, thoughtful, cultured, 
educated, godly man and woman to try to remove 
the one and mitigate the other. Bear with me for 
a short time longer. You are going away from 
this Hall very soon. I have been looking at this 
audience, and I see that many of you are going to 
homes of comfort and refinement ; and many of you 
are young and happy ; and God has prospered your 
way in life ; and a joy brighter than the beams of 
the morning shines in the hearts of some of you. 
Oh, bear with me whilst I tell you how low pome of 
our neighbours have fallen; how abject is their 
moral condition ; what anguish and agony unutter- 
able must embitter their dying moments unless they 
change. Oh, think of the sorrows of one day. 
The misery, the wretchedness, the tears, the awful 
woe, the wrongs crying to God for vengeance, the 
slavery of sin, the wild arms tossed up madly in 
seething vortexes of passion and despair. I never 
can go over those London bridges without sad and 
tender thoughts coming into my brain. Whenever 
I stand on them the very stones look to me red with 
human blood ; and the air all around is haunted 
with cruel, and bitter, and awful memories. There, 
at the dead of the night, when no human eye saw, 
and no human heart pitied, poor men in sin, and 
poorer women in shame have gone, and over 
those stony parapets, and down into that black, 
muddy water they have tried to find the peace which 
sin, and the devil, and the world never gave to 
them. There was a plash, a gurgle, the parted 



28 SEAMS. 

water, and then it was all over. Oh, thou gas upon 
the river, how many times has thy unpitying light 
shone down upon the garments of such as these. 
Oh, thou gas upon the river, when no human ear 
listened tliou didst hear the plash of the water, 
and the cry of the broken and despairing heaii; ! 

" The bleak winds of March 

Made her tremble and shiver, 
But not the dark arch 

Or the black flowing river. 
Mad from life's history, 
Q-lad to death's mystery; 

Swift to be hurl'd 
Anj-where ! anywhere 

Out of the world ! 
In she plung'd boldly, 
No matter how coldly 

The rough river ran; 
Over the brink of it, 
Pictui'e it — think of it 

Dissolute man ! 
Lave in it — drink of it 

Then if you can. 

Take her up tenderly, 

Lift her with care ; 
Pashion'd so slenderly, 

Young, and so fair." 

But why do I speak of these things to-night ? 
Because the other day I saw nearly a hundred 
convicts — every man linked and chained to another ; 
and just by, boys at i)lay — fair, and fresh, and ruddy 
of face, and a clear, silvery laughter floating like 
music on the morning air, and dying in echoes 
across the blue sea. But all those men were boys 
once ; and for all those who have fallen into wicked 
ways, and come to lives of sin and sorrow, I cannot 



SHAMS. 29 

help remembering that they were once like the" 
little children, who come round my house in Cam- 
bridgeshire, every spring time, to listen to the 
lambs bleat, and to pluck the cowslip and the violet 
from the fresh, green, English fields that lie all 
about me. It's very little indeed any of us can 
do to lessen these sins and sorrows; and perhaps 
those who have laboured the longest and worked 
the hardest know this best. But I am sure one of 
the great wants of the age is sympathy. 

*' Though, pride may show some nobleness 

When honours its ally ; 
Yet there is such a thing on earth, 

As holding heads too high. 

The sweetest flowers grow near the groundy 

The fairest birds build low, 
And we must stoop for happiness 
If we its worth would know." 
So stooping I believe we shall find. Oh, say a 
kind word when you can, help a toiling brother 
up-hill, do good, win the blessing of one ready to 
perish, visit the afflicted, feed the hungry, wipe 
away tears of sorrow, remember the fatherless, 
make the widow's heart sing for joy. Oh, don't 
have to upbraid yourself with the words : — 
"Alas ! I have walk'd through life 
Too heedless where I trod; 
Nay, helping to trample my fellow worm, 

And fill the burial sod — 
Forgetting that even the sparrow falls 
Not unmark'd of Q-od ! 

I drank the richest draughts ; 

And ate whatever is good — 
Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit, 

Supplied my hungry mood ; 
But I never remember' d the wretched ones 

That starve for want of food! 



30 SHAMS. 

I dress'd as the noble di-ess, 
In cloth of silver and gold, 
With silk, and satin, and costly fui's, 

In many an ample fold ; 
But I never remember' d the naked limbs 

That froze with winter's cold. 
The wounds I might have heal'd ! 

The human sorrow and smart! 
And yet it never was in my soul 

To play so poor a part; 
But evil is wrought by want of thought, 
As well as by want of heart." 
Yes, I am sure the world wants sympathy. I was 
in the north of England, years ago, when those two 
Imndi'ed bread winners fomid a living grave in that 
awful coal pit at Hartley, in Northumberland ; and 
I remember reading that our Royal Widow, the 
Queen, sat in her palace home washed by the 
southern seas ; she sat there a bereft and broken- 
hearted woman, like the poorest pitman's wife or 
pitboy's mother ; and down the electric wires she 
sent trembling messages of womanly tenderness 
and sympathy to those who sat in shadow of the 
same sorrow and grief as herself AVas she less 
queenly then because she was so womanly ? Are 
you less a gentleman because you can say a kind 
and cheery word to those socially beneath you ; or 
less a lady because you can throw the glory of a 
smile upon the sometimes sunless path of the poor. 
**0h, scatter the germs of the beautiful, 
By the wayside let them faU, 
That the rose may bloom by the cottage gate, 
And the vine on the cottage wall ; 
Yet scatter the germs of the beautiful, 
In the depths of the human soul — 

And there they will bud and blossom, and bear thee fruit, 
As long as the endless ages roll." 



SEAMS. 31 

A few more words and my lecture on Shams will 
close. I believe every attempt to remove these 
shams, or to do away with those more dire realities 
of which I have spoken, will be in vain, unless we 
have more faith in truth, and more trust in God. 
My words will be forgotten, but the truth will live. 
On the foot of the monument to the Scottish 
martyrs and heroes I read these words: "Indi- 
viduals may perish, but truth is immortal." Often 
have those words cheered me. Be encouraged all 
ye labourers in the Lord's vineyard, for they who 
sow in tears to-day may reap in joy to-morrow. 
It was in the spirit of this faith that, in olden days, 
men were bound with chains, and burned with fire, 
and cursed with cruel anathemas ; it was in the 
spirit of this faith that they sowed every wind with 
" sparks of fiery thought ; " it was in the spirit of 
this faith that they Jaid their heads upon the gory 
block, as little children do lie their's nightly upon a 
mother's knee ; it was in the spirit of this faith that 
they lived, and taught, and suffered, and died, 
bequeathing to us a heritage of freedom, and the 
deathless splendour of their high and holy renown. 
When I was a boy I remember reading, in fairy 
tales, how a city in a single night was petrified to 
stone. All was still, solemn, silent, lifeless, death- 
like. Suddenly, in a moment, a trumpet's shrill 
blast was heard. Then everything became full of 
life and motion. Then the warrior leapt upon his 
steed, and with his lance in rest rode on victory. 
Oh, you who have so kindly listened to me to-night, 
go away, and to-morrow put the trumpet — not to 
your lips, but to your lives ; and by hatred of 
pretence ; by love of the right, wherever you find 
it ; by lessening what Keats called the " dearth of 
noble natures;" by ''bearing without abuse the 
grand old name of gentleman ; " by being good, 



82 SHAMS. 

and doing good ; by trust in trutli, and faith in 
God, blow the music of a manlier and heavenlier 
life ; and as you go through the world, and pass to 
the confines of eternity chant, for measure of the 
heart and beat of the soul, those stirring and 
beautiful words of the great German poet Goethe : 
" Duty be thj polar guide — 

Do the right whate'er betide ; 

Haste not — rest not — conflicts past — 

God ■^ill cro"^n thy "work at last. 

"Without haste — and ^vithout rest — 
"Write the motto on thy breast ; 
Heed not flowers that round thee bloom, 
Bear it on-^vard to the tomb. 

Ponder -nrell and know the right — 
Onvrard then with all thy might ; 
Haste not — years can ne'er atone 
For one reckless action done. 

Eest not — life is sweeping by, 
Dare and do before you die ; 
Something mighty and sublime, 
Leave behind to conquer time ; 
Glorious 'tis to live for aye, 
"When these forms have pass'd away. 

Duty be thy polar guide — 
Do the right whate'er betide ; 
Haste not — rest not — conflicts past, 
God will crown thy work at last." 




THE 

BAHLE OF LIFE. 





THE 

BATTLE OF LIFE 



fOU have very kindly come here to night to 
listen to a lecture on the " Battle of Life" ; 
and the first words I am going to utter a 
great many of you won't like. I am going to tell 
you that if you are to get on in the world, or fight 
the Battle of Life to brave and successful issues 
you'll have to work. '' Oh," but some of you say, 
'^ we are at it fi:om morning to night : if you'll teach 
us how to get to the top of the ladder without 
climbing any steps ; if you'll show us how to begin 
in business where our fathers' left oif ; and if you'll 
take us down the royal road to learning, and devise 
a short cut to knowledge we'll be very much 
obliged to you for trying to teach us about these 
things ; but if you are going to take us down that 
old beaten rut of the ages and talk about work, why 
its a bit of business we are not at all prepared for." 
And yet I propose asking you to engage in that 



38 TlBLE BATTLE 



same business to-night : for a reason very clear to 
my own mind. I believe a great many seemingly 
decent young men are, in tliese days, growing 
afraid of work and ashamed of it. I don't mean 
the natui-ally lazy, like the drunken sailor, who said 
to the Captain: ''Well, what I say Captain is 
this : we ought all to be equal — share and share 
alike, you have half and I have half." " Well, but 
Jack, " said the Captain, " suppose we did that. 
You'd go away, and get di-unk with youi- money, 
and squander every penny of it ; and I should take 
care of mine and put it by : what do you propose 
to do then ? " '' Divide agam, Sii- " said Jack. Nor 
am I thinking of those sentimental young gentlemen, 
— the cheap imitation swells, who irrigate their 
shallow brains with day dreams of theii' fourpenny 
ha'penny gentility, — for I never expected to find one 
of them much in love with the rugged and the 
healthy ways of human existence. But sometime 
ago a young man committed suicide in Paris, and 
assigned for reason that he was born to be a man, 
but he was obliged to work as a grocer ; and not 
very long since a young man committed suicide at 
Brighton, assigning for reason that he could'nt 
endure to be a clerk in the railway offices at that 
town, from which I judge that I am not very far 
wrong in coming to the conclusion already men- 
tioned, and thinking that some of our smart and 
respectable young men are growing afraid of work 
and ashamed of it. I meet with people who are 
'' expecting something" — who are on the " look out 
for something" — who tell me they believe '' some- 
thing will tm-n up." So it will, I think, if they 
turn it up — not without. They are always talking 
about fortune, and sunshine, and good luck. What 
is good luck ? Good luck is to get up at five o'clock 
in the morning, if there be a necessity for it. Good 



OF LIFE. Z<^ 

luck J if you've only got a shilling a week coming in, 
is to live upon elevenpence, and take care of the 
odd penny. Good luck is to trouble your heads 
with your own business, and let your next door 
neighbour's alone — which a great many persons 
probably in this town are incapable of doing, unless, 
at least, they are very different to the people in 
West Wickham, where I live, for lots of them know 
how much money I have got in my pocket at this 
moment, and I'm sure I don't. Good luck is to be 
straight, and square, and fair, and honest in your 
dealings ; and it is to do to others as you would 
they should do to you. What luck can you and 
I trust to but the luck which comes from the 
honest exercise of the faculties and talents God 
gives to us ? Some of your fathers came 
into this town with half-a-crown in their pockets. 
To-night the world says they are rich men. I 
should'nt like to hurt the feelings — if that were at 
all possible — of any of their over-sensitive, over- 
dressed, and over-genteel sons and daughters ; but I 
should very much like to ask a question. How did 
the fathers make a fortune out of half-a-crown? 
Not by doing what some of their fast and empty- 
headed sons would do to-night — spending two shill- 
ings and ninepence out of it ; but by learning the 
philosophy of one of the oldest of the old sayings : 
^' Help yourselves and your friends will love you." 
They say in Wales : '' Get a horse of thine own 
and thou may'st always borrow another." That 
means, I suppose, get a sovereign into your pocket 
and a good many persons will lend you sixpence. 
Why ? Because they know you don't want one. 
Get up to the top of the hill, and lots of kind- 
hearted individuals will come to the foot, and 
they'll say : '' Oh, my dear Mr. So-and-so, I wish I 
could have the great pleasure, and the extreme 



40 THE BATTLE 



felicity, and the unspeakable happiness, of lending 
you my shoulder, and giving you a lift ; " but if 
you had been slipping down lots of them would 
never have come near you, and a good many of the 
others would have put out their foot, and given you 
an extra push, just to have helped you on the way. 
Trust in your own resources, young men. Be 
natural. Stand upon your own legs. Even for the 
A B C of Selp Help you want what the country 
people call a long head. Not like that lawyer's, to 
whom the barber's boy, when he was running the 
comb through his hair, said : ^' Lor, sir, what a long 
head you've got." " Yes, my boy, and we la^wyers 
want long heads." ''Well, I'll be blessed," said 
the boy, " if it aint as thick as it is long ! " Some- 
body asked Opie, the great painter, what he mixed 
his colours with. '' With my brains, sir," was the 
reply. Go and use your brains young men — if 
you've got any. If you hav'nt you must go to the 
dogs and the wall — ^your legitimate place, some fine 
teachers say. I pronounce no opinion upon that 
subject. I only know that a great many young 
men in these days are living such lives you would 
think they required to get for an epitaph above 
them when they die : — 

' ' Here lies a man who is of as much 

use under the ground as ever he was 

above it." 
But for all purposes of success in life a man must 
work. It's as time of the loftiest genius as of the 
poorest plodder. All those who in the strife and 
tussle of human life fought against odds ; all those 
who scaled the rocky mountains of difficulty, and 
shaped their lives to noble ends; all those who 
stirred the hearts of mankind with heroic and daring 
deeds ; all the brave and God-gifted children of the 
earth ; Wilkies' using barn door and burnt stick, 



OF LIFE. 41 

because they could'nt afford chalk and canvass ; 
Giffords' cobblers' apprentices working out their 
first mathematical problems on scraps of leather ; 
Fergusons' shepherd boys, on the plains, mapping 
out the heavenly bodies by means of a bit of string 
and a few beads ; all these — the poets, v/ho trilled 
out songs as in deathless music ; the orators, who 
swayed the heart as the old Norse wizards are 
reputed to have swayed the stormy winds with 
their caps ; my Lord Derby, when he translated the 
Iliad; Tennyson, in the jewelled fret work of his 
Idylls — all these, by toil of brain, as the meanest 
craftsman by sweat of brow, must fail or succeed in 
this world. Then is it work? Yes; but it's «(;or>^ 
and zvait. " This is hard pounding," said Wellington 
at Waterloo, " but presently we shall see who can 
pound the longest ; " and not only at the battle of 
Waterloo, but in the Battle of Life, a man who can 
stick to a thing will conquer. Sentimentality puts 
a thousand irons into the fire, but it never waits to 
let one get hot. It wants to become everything, 
and in the end becomes nothing. I remember 
reading once, how Colonel Beaufort found it neces- 
sary, in a great Spanish engagement, to get the brass 
trunnions broken off a cannon. In the emergency 
of the moment a hammer was given to a man to 
break off the trunnions. He pounded away for 
more than an hour, and at last broke them oft\ 
Then which blow broke off the trunnions ? The 
first ? The fifth ? The fiftieth ? The five 
hundredth ? Neither ; it was everi/ blow ; and so 
in the Battle of Life — it is every days work, and not 
the spasmodic jumps and jerks of a fortnight, that 
will make our young men or mar them. You'll 
stumble at the beginning. Greater people than 
any of us have stumbled. Demosthenes, the 
Grecian orator, was at first only a stutterer; 

F 



42 TRE BATTLE 



Benjamin Disraeli when he spoke the first time in 
the House of Commons broke down, amidst the 
laughter of that assembly of accomplished English 
gentlemen ; but he broke down with this memorable 
exclamation : " The time will come when you will 
hear me." When John Hunter, the great anatomist, 
went to deliver his first lecture to the students, there 
was'nt a soul present but the door keeper. '' John," 
he said, " open that cupboard, and fetch out that 
skeleton, and put it down there, and do you sit 
do^ii beside it, and then I shall be able to say : 
^Gentlemen,' and we'll make a beginging." And 
he did make a beginning, and the lectures afterwards 
were crowded ; but what was of more consequence 
than a crowd, they were great contributions to the 
science of the country. "Work and wait. You hear 
people say in derision, about some one of their 
neighbours. ''Oh yes, he's very clever, but he 
won't set the Thames on fire." " Set the Thames 
on fire ! " What does that mean ? In the old 
Lancashii-e and Yorkshire flour mills there was a 
receiver called the Temse. If a man tm-ned the 
handle of the mill very rapidly the friction ofttimes 
set fire to the Temse ; but if they had a lazy 
vagabond, who put his arms round at snails' pace, 
they used to say jeeringly : "Ah, that fellow will 
never set fire to the Temse." Then it got 
broadened into " he will never set fire to the 
Thames." But in the true meaning of the phrase 
it could be done ; but it could only be done by that 
persistent efi'ort and consistent energy which I 
believe to be the very bone and muscle of all true 
genius. Work and wait ; but I add another word : 
Work, and wait, and bear. Bear? Bear what? 
Well, sometimes the ridicule of fools. Can any of 
von tell me the value of their praises ? A young 
lady must be vain indeed if she felt delighted 



OF LIFE, 43 

because a deaf man praised her musical perform- 
ances, and you must be rather weak if you felt 
gratified when a blind man went into ecstacies over 
your drawing-room pictures. You all remember the 
story of Lord St. Leonard's, who raised himself from 
being a poor barber's boy to be Lord Chancellor of 
this kingdom. He went somewhere to deliver a 
speech, and a fellow in the crowd began to cry out : 
'' My Lord, where's the soap box ? My Lord, how 
about the lather brush ? " Then Lord St. Leonard's 
stopped. He said : " There's a person in the crowd 
interrupts me. He wishes to remind me of my 
lowly origin ; he wants to tell me that I was once 
only a poor barber's boy. Ladies and gentlemen, 
if that person had been a barber's boy he would 
have remained one." Be sure of that. It was on 
another occasion when Lord Tenterden — who rose 
from the position of a barber's boy to be, not Lord 
Chancellor, but Lord Chief Justice of the then 
Court of King's Bench— was delivering a speech, 
when a sprig of nobility said, jeeringly and in 
undertone, "thaty as far as he personally was con- 
cerned, he did'nt much think they wanted to be 
instructed by barbers' boys ; " to which Lord 
Tenterden, with great dignity and solemnity of 
manner, replied ''that whilst the noble peer, who 
with so much decency had just interrupted him, 
gloried in his descent, he (Lord Tenterden) gloried 
in his ascent." And that, thought about aright, is 
I suppose a very different thing altogether. Yes ; 
work, and wait, and bear, and be wisely ambitious. 
Stand up like a man, and seek to excel, and 
improve your condition, and cultivate your intellect, 
and open your heart to generous sympathies, and 
throw round daily toil the garland of a brave and 
heroic spirit. Shall I tell you of that great army of 
noble men who rose from the ranks of poverty to be 



4'i THE BATTLE 



stars in the nation's history ? Shall I mention their 
names V John Bunyan, dreaming in the prison cell 
by the sluggish Ouse, and writing a book the world 
dare not let die. Shall I mention their names? 
William Carey, sitting in his poor cottage home, 
reading " Cook's Voyages Round the World," and 
becoming afterwards the honoured missionary men 
love to read about. Shall I mention their names ? 
Elihu Burritt, standing by the blacksmith's forge, 
wiping away the hot sweat of honest labour, and 
acquiring more of the world's languages than any 
living man. Shall 1 mention their names? Dr. 
Livingstone, the poor factory boy ; John Cassell, as 
homely a carpenter as ever knocked a tenpenny 
nail into a piece of wood ; Abraham Lincoln, the 
derided rail splitter, but afterwards much beloved 
Chief Magistrate of America. Shall I mention their 
names ? Richard Cobden. sleeping to-night under 
the daisies of a Sussex churchyard ; and Michael 
Faraday, the son of a poor Yorkshire blacksmith, 
going to London, and unlocking chamber after 
chamber in the great Palace of Science, becoming 
as good as he was wise and great. Shall I mention 
their names ? James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd, 
wrapping round him his plaid, eating an oaten 
bannock, and dreaming of "Bonnie Kilmeny; " 
Burns, casting his sweat gemmed sickle into the 
golden headed grain, while his soul was iired with 
immortal song ; Shakespeare, born in lowly estate, 
but full of thoughts, which have made his name 
mighty, " not for an age but for all time." Oh! 
don't say that I want to make the people discon- 
tented. I hate the silly dreams of a mad or 
feverish ambition, but I hate also the envy or 
the bigotry that would stifle the yearnings, and 
paralyze the best energies of young England. I 
am not sj^eaking of the fiery flashes and brilliant 



OF LIFM. 45 

corruscations of genius, for you can never extinguish 
these ; but you may bring down to one low, dead 
level the life of the common people. I know we 
want hewers of wood and drawers of water. There 
must be broad backs and cunning fingers. The 
land must be tilled, the shoe cobbled, the streets be 
swept, and from the blacksmith's flaming forge 

" the burning sparks fly up 
Like chaff froin a threshing floor ;" 

but will the toiler be any worse because he works 
and thinks, because he can read and reason, because 
he knows right from wrong, because he cherishes 
the tender joys of home, and seeks to better his 
social position ? I wish the motto of every man 
and woman was 

EXCELSIOE ! 
Onward — upward — higher ! Excelsior ! Up 
the mountain of knowledge and culture, be the 
height ever so dazzling, and the summit ever so 
distant ; Excelsior ! though the road be rough and 
rugged, and the stones be sharp under the toiler's 
feet ; Excelsior ! with high resolve and proudly 
beating heart, for ever listening to that music from 
afar which beckons forth the better hope ; Excelsior ! 
Step by step, with a spirit to conquer or be con- 
quered, breaking the hugh stones of difficulty till 
from powdered dust you can pick the gems of 
precious worth ; Excelsior ! for health and strength, 
and just as travellers climb some Alpine steep to 
revel in the joy which lies in fertile vales, and ever 
widening plans ; Excelsior ! 

"In life's rosy morning, 
In manhood's fair pride, 
Let this he your motto 
To comfort and guide ; 
In cloud and in sunshine, 
Whatever assail 
We'll onward and conquer, 
And never say Fail." 



46 TUB BATTLE 



Then not only work, and wait, and bear, and be 
wisely ambitious, but get character. There's a great 
deal of difference between character and reputation. 
My reputation is what you will say about me : my 
character is what I am. My reputation may be 
destroyed in six weeks, six months, six years, as I 
am widely known, or the reverse ; but my character 
is just the same whether you praise me or whether 
you blame me ; and it does'nt much matter in the end 
whether we be " crowned or crownless by this 
world, so that life and God's work be done." 
Character alone makes men kingly. Shakespeare 
taught that, I think, centuries ago. When Horatio 
told Hamlet that he had seen the ghost of his buried 
father, he made remark — in softening and noble 
eulogy: he was a good king: to which Hamlet 
the Prince of Denmark replied : "he was a man, 
take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like 
again." As if to be a man in the highest sense 
was to be bravest, kingliest, best. I think it will be 
so always. A diamond is a diamond whether it 
flash like a star in the centre of a king's crown, or 
be hid in the mire of the dunghill ; and a man's 
a man whether he wear hodden grey, or be clothed 
in ermine and j)urple, and fine linen. All the rags 
in the world never hid a noble soul from the sight 
of God and the angels ; all the perishable finery 
of the earth could not exalt a vulgar, a sinful, and 
degraded one. Yes, character makes men kingly ; 
foi when Garibaldi had given a kingdom to a king, 
and had the ri('hGs of a great city all lying at his 
feet, he went back to his island home unstarred, 
unbadged, a poor man with only fifteen shillings in 
his pocket, and a red shirt on his back ; but tried by 
every standard in the world, he was braver — grander 
— nobler — a more khiglv man than he of Naples — 



OF LIFE. 47 

with all the trappings of a loftier estate, enslaving a 
people and oppressing a great nation. 

" There's a game in fashion, I think it's called Euchre, 
Though I never have played it for pleasure or lucre ; 
In which when the cards are in certain conditions, 
The players all seem to have changed their positions ; 
And one of them says in a confident tone : 
"Well, I think I can venture to go it alone." 

In watching the game 'tis a whim of the bards, 
A moral to draw from the skirmish of cards, 
And to fancy he sees in that paltry strife 
Some excellent hints for the battle of life — 
"Where, whether the prize be a ribbon or throne, 
The winner is he who can go it alone. 

When great Galileo proclaimed that the world 
In a regular orbit is ceaselessly whirled; 
And got not a convert for all of his pains, 
But only derision — and prison — and chains; 
"It moves for aU that," was his answering tone, 
For he felt in his soul he could go it alone. 

When Kepler, with intellect piercing afar. 

Discovered the laws of each planet and star — 

And the doctors, who ought to have lauded his name. 

Derided his learning, and blackened his fame — 

"I can wait" — he replied — "till the truth you shall own," 

For he felt in his sotd he could go it alone. 

Alas for the player who idly depends 
In the changes of life upon fortune or friends ; 
Whatever the value of blessings like these. 
They can never make up for inglorious ease, 
Nor comfort that coward who finds, with a groan, 
That his crutches have left him to go it alone. 



48 TEE BATTLE 



There's something, no doubt, in the cards you may hold : 

Health, family culture, wit, beauty, and gold. 

An ancestor's name, well loved and unmarred, 

Is each in its way a most excellent card ; 

Tet the game may be lost, with all these for your own, 

Unless you've the courage to go it alone. 

In battle or business — whatever the game. 

In law or in love, it is ever the same ; 

In the scramble for power, or the struggle for pelf. 

Let this be the motto: "Rely on thyself — 

For whether the prize be a ribbon or throne, 

The winner is he who can go it alone." 

That leads me to tliis : that always in the Battle 
of Life that which lies close to us should engage 
our most earnest attention. ^'Ah," but you say, 
" if I only lived in London." Yes, but perhaps 
you live in a country town, or village. '' Ah," 
but you say, " if I only lived in the Squire's 
mansion." Yes, but very likely you live in a 
shoemaker's cottage ; and you put me in mind of 
the fellow who was in the stocks ; and his mother 
kept mnning round and round, and crying, " Oh, 
my boy, they can't answer for putting you there — 
they can't answer for putting you there." " But 
they have answered for it mother," said the man ; 
" I'm here : try and get me out." Now, my good 
friends, you are here ; and some people might offer 
you the consolation Abemethy offered to the Duchess 
of Marlborough when she said she '"'■ couldn't get her 
arm up." " Very well then," said Abernethy, ''keep 
it down ; that's all I've got to say about it." But I 
can offer nobler consolation than that, for I think I 
can show you that in the brave doing of every day's 
duty we shall find some of the joy and blessedness of 
being. I am not quite sure that a fool in the 



OF LIFE, 49 

country will become a wise man immediately he 
arrives in London, and I am not quite sure that 
they are all wise people in London. A Lancashire 
man once said : ''when I went to Lunnon I thowt 
I were going to the Temple of Wisdom. I thowt 
they were all wise folk there ; but I soon found as 
big fools in Lunnon as any where else, and my 
what a lot of 'em there are too !" I am not certain 
that if a man can't do common work well, he's so 
very likely to do extraordinary work well ; and I 
long ago thought that it was possible to ennoble a 
lowly position, and equally possible to degrade a 
lofty one. Joy, and blessing, and satisfaction will 
spring from the brave doing of that which God puts 
nearest. Longfellow, in one of the most striking of 
his minor poems — '' Gaspar Becerra" — teaches that 
most beautifully. 

" By his evening fire the artist 

Pondered o'er his secret shame ; 
Baffled, weary, and disheartened, 

StiU he mused, and dreamed of fame. 
'Twas an image of the Yirgin 

That had tasked his utmost skill; 
But alas! his fair ideal 

Vanished and escaped him still. 
From a distant Eastern island 

Had the precious wood been brought ; 
Day and night the anxious master 
At his toil untiring wrought ; 
Till, discouraged and desxjonding, 
Sat he now in shadows deep, 
And the day's humiliation 

Found oblivion in sleep. 
Then a voice cried, "Rise, master! 

From the burning brand of oak 
Shape the thought that stirs within thee!" 
And the startled artist woke,— 
G 



•30 THE BATTLE 



AVoke, and from the smoking embers 

Seized and quenclied the glowing -wood \ 
And therefrom he carved an image, 

And lie saw that it was good. 
thou sculptor, painter, poet ! 

Take this lesson to thy heart : 
That is best which lieth nearest ; 

Sliajie from that thy work of art." 

I must confess to you that I have little faith in senti- 
mental and extraordinary people, who can do any- 
thing in the world for you, except do their duty ; and 
who seem to want to have patent paper wings manu- 
factured with which they may soar above the common 
realities, and the common work, of every day life. 
When I was a little boy a man came to my native 
town and he put out large bills all over the place : 
'•'■ Professor So and So will fly fi'om the Ohiu'ch to 
the Market house." Everybody was full of it; 
they ran and talked about it from cottage to cottage, 
and from shop to shoj), wondering how it could 
possibly happen. The only thing that stood in the 
way of the Professor's performance was this : he had 
to gain the Vicar's permission. The Vicar was not 
only a very good man but he was a very witty man, 
and exceedingly fond of a joke and a bit of fun, 
and I am not prepared to say that he was any the 
worse for that. Well, one morning the Professor 
rapped at the vicarage door, and he was sho^vn into 
the Vicar's study: "I have called, Sir, to ask your 
jDcrmission to perfomi a very wonderful feat.'' 
'' What is it, my friend," said the Vicar. " I am 
exceedingly anxious, Sii', to perform the very 
wonderful feat of flying from the Church to the 
Market house." "I can't grant it my friend," 
said the Vicar, " there are too many. Sir, flying 
from \h^ Church already. If it had been 



X)F LIFil. 51 

from the Market-liouse to the Church you 
should have had my full permission and my hearty 
concurrence immediately." Professor So-and-so 
stayed in the town two or three days, and then 
flew away from the hotel where he had put up, 
one pound nineteen shillings and sixpence in debt. 
Have a care of all flyers. Beware of all these 
wonderfid, and extraordinary, and uncommon 
beings, who must always be seen and heard, and 
who run from moral pillar to post, but never 
manfully discharge a duty, or iDravely bear a 
responsibility. I saw a man the other day that I 
had'nt looked upon since I was a boy ; but when I 
was a boy I knew him to be nearly everything in 
political, social, moral, and religious profession ; 
especially everything in religious profession — 
Churchman, Independent, Wesleyan, Baptist, Primi- 
tive Methodist, Plymouth Brother, Latter-Day Saint, 
finally, and by way of a wind-up, he became what 
he called " A New Light ! " He was in everybody's 
debt, his children were the dirtiest in the town, and 
his home was a scene of wretchedness and confusion. 
Would' nt it be better, think you, to be an " Old 
Light," and, as I tried last night, in my poor 
measure, to teach you, to make our lives brighter 
and our homes happier, and to stand up, in all 
places, and under all honourable conditions, like 
men connected with God — doing God's work — 
giving God the glory. Turn away from common 
sense, wholesome and healthy, in the Battle of 
Life, and you'll degenerate into namby-pamby ism. 
Namby-pamby ism — what's that ? Well, there's 
physical and moral. Abernethy was much troubled 
by a lady, who who was always running to him and 
telling him there was something amiss. One day 
she went in a very great hurry, and said she must 
see him immediately. When she saw him she said 



62 THE BATTLE 



she clid'nt like to tell lilin. " Oh, but my dear 
madam," he said, " I can do nothing for you unless 
you tell me what's the matter." " Well," she said, 
*' it was so singular, it was so extraordinary, it was 
so uncommon, she really hoped he'd excuse her." 
" I'll thank you, woman," he said, '' not to waste 
my time and your own money. If there's anything 
the matter with you, why don't you tell me." And 
at last she confessed tnat she had swallowed a 
spider. " Swallowed a spider ? Well, I never had 
to prescribe for anything like that before," said 
Abernethy; "but I'll put a paper in an envelope, 
and you drive straight home, don't speak to anyone, 
go to your room, lock the door, break the envelope, 
read the paper, and do as it tells you." So the 
lady drove straight home, and she did'nt speak to 
anyone, and she went to her room, and she locked 
the door, and she broke the envelope, and read the 
paper ; and it told her that she was to catch a fly, 
and put it in her mouth, and when she had shut her 
mouth the spider would be sure to hear the fly 
burring and buzzing about, and it w^ould come up 
after it, and then she was to spit them both out 
together. I call that a capital cm^e for physical 
namby-pambyism ; and it has about it the robust 
and masculine common sense peculiar to Dr. 
Abernethy in the story that's told of him of a 
woman running into the surgery, and saying her 
" good for nothing, vagabond of a boy had been and 
drunk a twopenny bottle of ink. '' Then," said 
Abernethy, " give him half-a-dozen sheets of blotting 
paper, and that'll put matters to rights immediately." 
But to be serious. Suppose we are not all gifted 
alike. Supj^ose we can't all be kings and captains 
in the strife. Do all birds sing like the nightingale ? 
Do they all carol like the lark ? Do they all career 
with the sweeping eagle, spreading its wings in the 



OF LIFE. 53 

golden light of the day ? And did it ever strike 
you young people that there's no merit in a gift : 
the merit lies in the right use of it. If you know 
more than others you should do more ; and if you 
have more you should dispense more. I stood, not 
long ago, on the northern coast of Ireland, close to 
the magnificent Giant's Causeway. I stood there 
watching the wild sea roll and sweep in its glassy 
beauty, every wave shaking from its head white 
crowns of foamy spray ; and when I turned away, 
and was driving to my lodgings in Coleraine, there, 
gliding through the grassy fields like a silver ribbon 
unfurled from a reel, I saw a brook, not much 
wider than fifty times the length of my arm ; and 
then I thought: It is so ever; Grod lifts up the 
giant mountains, and He sets sublimity enthroned 
upon their tops like a monarch ; but He writes the 
old story of Beauty in every daisy quilted field. 
I see the ocean, with its crested waves, like white- 
robed choristers of the mighty deep ; but what of 
the dew drops that glisten like tears of joy on every 
summer flower, and the brooks that babble past 
poor men's homes. And if there be prophets, 
apostles, martyrs, moral Titans of the earth, sweet 
singers of a deathless music, there be also commoner 
men and women, like you and I, with homes to 
make happy, with firesides to make bright, with evil 
to turn from, with good to pursue, with a world to 
get on in, and a life battle right bravely to fight ; 
and if with five talents we do our best, we, in one 
sense, ' do just as much as those who have fifty 
thousand talents and only do their best. So, I 
repeat : Work, wait, bear ; be wisely ambitious ; be 
real, and manly, and true ; get character ; do that 
which lies close to you ; know the right, and never 
forsake it ; get principles, and stick to them. Lots 
of persons will be anything you like. They'll blow 



54 THE BATTLE 



hot to-night and cold to-morrow morning ; they'll 
run with tlie hare and follow witli the hounds ; 
they'll be with the ''Blues" in politics this week, 
and with the '' Yellows" the next; and any other 
colour in creation, if its only the colour that's going 
to PAY. They'll whisper and tell you to hold your 
tongue, and keep quiet, and mind what you're about, 
and see which way your bread's buttered ; and if 
there's anything wrong wink your eye at it; and they'll 
quote apostolic words, and remind you that you 
should live in peace, and be all things to all men. 
And we have funeral sermons preached about people 
in these days, and a great many vii^:ues discovered, 
when folk are dead, that nobody was ever fortunate 
enough to find out when they were alive ; and one 
of the things you get told is : '' he never made an 
enemy." Tennyson says " there never yet was 
noble man, but made ignoble talk ; he makes no 
friend who never made a foe." Wlien our Lord and 
Master came, living amid those beautiful hills of 
Judea, as man never lived or spake, they called him 
a '' wine bibber," gluttonous," the friend of sinners." 
" Woe be unto you " — not only in Judea, but very 
likely in this place too — if all men speak well of 
you. Our business should be to know the right, and 
then to hold to it. There died some years ago in 
the south of England an eminent man. He did'nt 
begin life in a very eminent way, not as the world 
counts eminence, for he began it by being apprenticed 
to a wheelwright. Before he was out of his 
apprenticeship he fell in love. When he was out of 
his apprenticeship he got married. When he was 
married he hadn't anything to keep a wife with* 
So the next day he started off, and walked thirty 
miles to try and find employment, but he could'nt 
find any ; and like a sensible fellow he walked back 
again. It's a good thinor sometimes in the Battle of 



OF LIFE, 55 

Life to go back a little way. When the tramp was 
breaking through the hedge, and was about to leap 
the ditch, suddenly on the other side apj)eared the 
farmer. '' Where are you going to ? ''I am going 
back if you please Sir was the reply." The next 
day our newly married friend started out again, and 
he obtained work at twenty three shillings a week, 
he toiled several years, and he managed to save 
seventy pounds. Then he became very anxious to set 
up in business for himself. He did set up, and 
in three weeks every penny of his seventy pounds 
was gone in labour and materials. Then came an 
election, and first one party and then the other 
waited upon him. They said if he would vote for 
their man they would back him, help him, give 
him a lift up, establish him, set him on his legs. 
" Gentlemen," he said, '' I am a very poor man, 
but I have always held certain opinions, and believed 
in certain principles, and I mean to stick to my 
principles, if it's at the sacrifice of all I have got." 
He did stick to his principles ; and he succeded in 
trade, and prospered in business, and became the 
largest employer of labour in that southern town ; 
three times they made him mayor of it ; his car- 
riages went all over the world ; at last he died — 
revered, honoured, beloved by a great multitude : 
a man who held to principle. So have I seen in 
distant parts mountains lifting their faces to the 
heavens. By and bye the storm came — thunder 
roar — lightning flash — the tempest beating and 
playing there in fary ; but because the foundations 
of the mountains were strong, fixed, immoveable, 
they could not be shaken ; and presently the storm 
discords died away into sweetest music and 
heavenliest calm, and the sun coming forth in its 
olden and kingly beauty lit up the mountains^ 
summits with unspeakable splendour. So too, that 



56 TEE BATTLE 



man who stands firm upon the rock of truth and 
principle, storms may come, thunder roar and 
lightning flasl^ of the world's anger and ridicule, 
the waves of scorn rolling around in fury ; but if 
he stand finn, his feet on the rock and his face to- 
wards God, all the anger, and the ridicule, and the 
scorn will pass away ; and to that faithful soul there 
will come the cadences of a divine melody, and the 
rest and joy of the peace which passeth under- 
standing. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, this brings me to a 
word that has more to do with the Battle of Life 
than any word I have mentioned up to this moment. 
You'll all guess the word I mean. Save that 
dearest and best of earthly words called " mother," 
I know of nothing in the English language like it. 
It's my business to leave mine a good deal, and 
people often say to me : " Wli}^, John, this must be 
very pleasant, seeing so many fresh places and new 
faces ; " and I always smile — somewhat sadly I 
fear — for I get thinking of old George Ridley's 
words : 

"Let fools go searcliing far and nigli, 
We'll stay at home, my dog and I." 

And there staying will perhaps grow happier and 
better : for the dearest spot on earth to me 

"where're I roam, 
Is Home, sweet homo." 
"Home, sweet home, there's no place like home." 

That was the spot where I breathed my first breath, 
and got my first kiss, and learnt my first life lesson. 
" Home, sweet home, there's no place like home ! " 
That was the spot my dead mother — in years too 
far off for me — sanctified with \\\q height and the 
depth of her unspeakable devotion. '' Home, sweet 
home, there's no place like home ! " There child- 



OF LIFE. 57 

liood, and ydutli, and inanliood, and old age, its 
face all wrinkled with manifold experiences, should 
mingle together in beautiful liarmon}*^ Let us re- 
member that it is not tvhere we live, but how we live. 
I once heard a lady say — and she lived in a magni- 
ficent house — that she had seen more real happiness 
in the cottages of the poor than in the great mansion 
where she dwelt. Oh, think of it, poor men and 
women ! Just as the golden sunbeams will dance and 
play upon the cottages of the peasant as well as 
upon the palaces of princes — so joy, and peace, and 
rest, and love may dwell by the lowliest fireside. 
Then again, it is not what we have, but what we are 
that makes us. The hand may be hard with labour, 
yet the heart may be soft with pity ; the face may 
be seamed and soiled with daily toil, yet the soul 
may have onward and upward yearnings ; and 
homes, thougli ever so humble, may be rich in the 
sweet affections which bless the world. 
" Til ere are as many pleasant things, 

As many joyous tones, 
For tliose who sit by cottage heartlis, 

As tliose who sit on thrones." 
*' Home, sweet home, there's no place like home I " 

Happy homes make a great, strong, free, and 
glorious nation. All reform should begin at home. 
Our homes should be centres of love, mercy, kind- 
ness, — shedding light to all around. We must bear 
with the wayAvard — strengthen the weak — hel}) the 
sloAv — encourage the timid — watch over the tempted 
ones — say a kind word to the erring. 

"AVo arc all of us human, and all of us erring, 
And mercy within us should ever bo stirring" 

Oh, I have such faith in the power of kind words. 
Kind words ! nerving young men to withstand the 
temptations of every day life ; kind words ! piercing 
H 



58 THE llATTLE 



hard, selfish hearts, and making them yield obe- 
dience to the pure and good ; kind words ! dashing 
aside tear dro})s of agony, and holding heads erect 
in moral dignity ; kind words ! making dark, dreary 
homes of desolation, break forth into beauty and 
rejoicing. And they are so cheap, they may be 
given so freely. I like that dear old fable of the 
wind and the sun falling out. Shall I remind you 
of it ? They tried their strength upon a traveller, 
the wind beginning first. It howled mighty music 
— snapped the pine growth of a century — di'ove the 
leaves whistling through the forest— and went for- 
ward upon its wondrous working way. And the 
man wrapped close round him his cloak, bent down 
before the storm, and persevered, till the wind gave 
lip the contest. Then the sun came out soft, and 
clear, and bright, and golden, and threw its beauti- 
ful rays uj^on the traveller, till overpowered, he cast 
aside his cloak, and dropped dovi'n upon the green- 
sward. So shall it be with our words, hard, and 
rough, and cutting, and cruel, and men shall wrap 
closer round them the sins which curse and enslave ; 
but before the golden, lovely, Christ-like power of 
kind Avords, they shall often be smit into submission, 
and with the confiding hearts of little children be 
won back to joy and peace — to heaven and God. 

But I must find fault with two things in the 
home. We can be so polite, and so ^miable, and so 
affable, and so agreeable, and so delightful, and so 
angelical, when we get into Mr. Snook's parlour, and 
Mrs. Bumbledon's drawing-room ; but at home if 
we've got anything iriitable, and ugly, and can- 
tankerous, and disagreeable, and bad tempered 
about us, we generally show it for the benefit of 
those who ought to be nearest and dearest. Some 
people are always grumbling at home. They put 
me in mind of my father-in-law, who has been in 



OF LIFE. 59 

business as a farmer for nea,rly sixty years, and 
whenever I sit down and talk to liim he tells mo 
he has lost money every year. What a 
tremendous capital he must have had when he made 
a start more than half a century ago ! But I knew 
^ man and his wife who never did agree but once« 
They then agreed that they would agree, " Robert," 
the wife said, " Robert, I've got a good thought 
<3ome into my head," '' Bless me," he said, 
"■ There aint been one there for a good many 
years to my certain knowledge." '' Well," she 
said, '' I should like that we should agree to agree." 
''Agreed," he said. So they sat together several 
hours without speaking, but the old lady couldn't 
bear that any longer, so at last she said, " 0, dear, 
I wish I was dead." "I wish so too!" said the 
old man. So they did agree, and they took matters 
very quietly ; but does this grumbling ever make a 
heart lighter,^ home happier, a soul stronger to dare 
and do in the world ; and will you who have grown 
^ray and wrinkled in fighting The Battle of Life 
permit me to quote those simple and beautiful words : 
'' The kindest and the happiest pair, 
Will find occasion to forbear, 
And something every day they live, 
To pity, and perhaps forgive," 

And now, can any of you tell me of what use it is 
to teach a poor girl, who is to become the wife of a 
hard working labouring man, the height of a moun- 
tain, or the length of a river, or to have fifteen fine 
names for a pudding-bag, when she knows positively 
nothing of that Avhich is to fit her to be one of the 
lights of an English home, and one of the mother's 
of a j)eople brave and free. There's plenty of "ism" 
and " ology ", — but not enough scrubology, and sew- 
ology, and bakeology, and boilology, and puddiog- 
makeology, and the ology that would do something, 



6G TJIE BATTLE 

towards makiiio- a pooi- niaiv.s iii-csidc a more atf.rac- 
tive sj)ot, tlian the sanded taproom, and the bright 
parlour, of tlic Blue ]3adger and the Green Pig. 
But all this trenches upon the region of common 
sense, and it does'nt run in the way of three farthing 
bits of finery ; and therefore its not likely to be very 
popular A\'itli some people We live in days when 
all the jackdaws put cm peacocks feathers, and 
immediately think themselves fidl blown birds of 
])aradise; and there's a little danger that some of 
the old fashioned virtues, and the domestic morals 
of the land, may be forgotten, at a time, when half 
the world is scrambling and fighting for what it 
shall get^ and not for what it shall do ; and the other 
half thinking of how it shall look, and seem in the 
eyes of its next door nciglibour ; and all the time 
forgetting that Eternal and never slumbering eye of 
God that sees you, and I, all the world at this 
moment. 

I have been quoting many times from the poets ; 
and now, after eighteen years of public speaking, I 
think it almost impossible for me to make a speech, 
or deliver a lecture without quoting poetry. I want 
to quote once more. Tennyson makes Sir 
Galahad say: 

"My strength is as the strength often, 
Because niy heart is pure." 
How many a young man has said he would see life, 
and has found death, — has said he would kiss the 
painted bloom off pleasure's cheeks, and has found 
them pale as pains, and cold as deaths, — has said he 
would follow in her footsteps, and he did so, till 
coming to the side of the grave, and the confines of 
a jojdess immortality he found the promises a 
mockery, and the service too hard for any soul to 
bear. Last November I rode, one morning, on the 
top of a coach, nearly forty miles on the Avestern 



OF LIFB. 61 

coast of Scotland. It was a bright, fresh, clear, 
winter's day; the sea slept in beauty on the left, 
and the striking and romantic country stretched 
away to the right. I never enjoyed anything more 
in my life. All at once the driver of the coach 
touched me, and said, '' There it lies ; " and looking 
down I beheld the torn and broken bottom of a ship 
— half as large as the floor of this hall. Only a 
week or two before that ship had been a gay and 
gallant thing — full of life and beauty — when its keel 
kissed the billows, and its sails spread to the morning 
bieeze, — and there it did lie at my feet, — tossed 
upon huge rock and black boulder — torn, twisted, 
shattered, bent ; a useless and helpless wreck. So 
have I seen wrecks of men and wrecks of women. 
Oh, what fair hopes have been crushed out in great 
cities ! How many a lad — strong and brave, the 
pride of home, the joy of the fireside, the darling of 
the family — has gone there, and in after years, the 
father — his grey hairs brought with sorrow to the 
grave — has cried, like one of old : ''0 Absalom my, 
son Absalom, would Grod I had died for thee ; " and 
fond mothers, with broken hearts, still full of a love 
that no sin or cruelty could crush, have peered out 
into the moral darkness, praying for children lost 
almost beyond recall. 

" O mighty mystery, London, there he children still who 
hold. 

Her palaces are silver roof'd, her pavements are of gold; 

And blindly in that dark of fate they grope for the 
golden prize, 

For somewhere hidden in her heart the charmed treasure 
lies. 

Such glory burning in the skies, she lifts her crown of 
light 

Above the dark, we see not what wo trample in the night. 

O merry world of London ! acliing world of moan. 



bj tAe battle 



How many a soul hath stooped to thoo, and lost its 

starry throne ! 
There Circe brims her sparkling ruby, dancing welcome 

— laughs 
All scruples down with wicked eye, and the crazed lover 

quaffs 
Until the fires of heaven have left white ashes on his 

lips. 
And there they pass whose tortured hearts the worm 

that dies not grips. 
The stricken crawl apart to die. There many a bosom 

heaves, 
With merry laughters, mornful as the dancing of dead 

leaves. 
There griping greed, rich heaps of yellow wealth of bank 

and shop. 

As Autumn leaves grow goldenest when rotten ripe to 

drop. 
****** 

" And day by day on each highway, from many a sunny 

shire , 
The country life comes green to wither 'fore the hungry 

fire. 
All into London leaping leaping flows the human sea. 
Where a wreck at heart or a prize in arms, the waves 

flash merrily. 
***#** 

" While ever and for ever goeth up to God for doom 

The city's breath of life and death, in glory or in gloom, 

And there it rings each spirit round, of light or darkness 
woven. 

And they shall wake and walk their self-unfolded hell or 

heaven. 
Nightly a merry harvest home the Devil in London di'ives. 
And gather on the shores of hell the wreck of humaa 

lives. 



OF LIFE. 6J 

I shall never forget what happened in the north 
of England some years ago. They turned out of a 
public-house at Gateshead a young girl, described in 
the Newcastle on Tyne daily papers as very beauti- 
ful — eighteen years of age — at eleven o'clock on 
Saturday night — druiik — picked up dead under a 
wall on Sunday morning. Eighteen years of age I 
Think of it you fathers with young daughters ! 
Eighteen years of age ! you young men who have 
sisters ! Eighteen years of age ! you English girls 
who have come here with a joy in your hearts brighter 
than the beaius of the morning ! Eighteen years of 
age ! they were few years to chronicle a life of sin, 
and blacken the end of it with such lurid and av^^ful 
darkness. And when I got back to London, for at 
that time I was living there, a lion had broken loose 
in Astley's theatre, in the Vf estminster road, and had 
killed a man ; then all the daily papers wrote articles 
as long as my arm ; they said the Government 
should step in, they said the Lord Chamberlain 
should interfere, they said all such exhibitions should 
be put a stop to, they said the lives of Her Majesty's 
subjects should be protected ; but I say that in every 
town and city in England to-night there's greater 
than a lion amongst us, — and it slays the health, the 
happiness, the prosperity, and the virtue of thousands 
and tens of thousands of the people. And now I have 
tried to show you how the Battle of Life may be 
bravely fought. I have said work — wait — bear — be 
wisely ambitious — get character — be real — do that 
which lies close to you — be men of principle — love 
home — cherish the fireside joys — live the pure life ; 
and now let me add this : while you are trying to 
get on in the world yourself — help others to do the 
same. Carry about with you a hand willing to help, 
and a heart ready to pity all those who have fallen 
by the way. Remember in kindness those 



64 THE BATTLE 



"who cliorislied 

Noble longings for tlio strife ; 

By tlie road-side foil and perished, 

Weary with the march of life." 

You ask me to look at the star-spangled lieavons, 

and, as I behold planet after planet, you say, '' one 

soul outweighs tlicm all." You proclaim it more 

2)recious than mine of gold, or crown of jewels ; and 

you whisper that it was bought witli a price — its 

l)rice being the agony and death of the Meek and 

Lowly One. You tell me that the noblest work in 

which I can engage is to be instrumental in saving a 

soul from death, and lifting it up to the liberty of 

sonslii]) with God. Do you believe it ? Oh, then, 

here are souls passing away, uncared for, unloved, 

unwept — going down to the " grave Avithout hope or 

God in the world " — sinking in the great ocean of 

iniquity, without a rising bubble to tell of their 

disappearance. And you say that life is so short, 

time is so fleeting, opportunities for doing good are 

so transient. In one year, from January to January, 

there were thirty-one million, five hundred thousand 

of the world's population who went down to the 

earth again. Place them in long array, and they 

will give a moving column of thirteen hundred to 

every mile of the globe's circumference. Ponder 

and look at this astounding computation ! What a 

spectacle as they move on — tramp — tramp — tramp 

— forward upon this stujjendous death march : 

*' Life is short and time is fleeting, 

And our hearts, though strong and bravo, 

Still like mufllod drums aro beating 

Funeral marches to the grave." 

Or, as has been sweetly sung : 

**A hundred years! and still and low 
AV'^ill bo my tloeping head! 



OF LIFE. 65 

A hundred j'-ears, and grass will grow 
Above my dreamless bed. 

**Tlie grass will grow, the brooks will run, 
Life still as fresb. and fair. 
Will break in beauty 'neatb the sun ; 
Where will my place be ? where ? " 
Oh come and strengthen the hands of those who for 
long years have toiled in the Master's vineyard. 
Tell me not that you care only for gold, for wealth, 
for pleasure, for applause, for the mere gratification 
of selfish aims, and personal ambitions. Here is 
truth to be uplifted — liberty to be guarded — love to 
be practised, and good news, or glad tidings of great 
joy to be whispered to the people : here are hearts 
to be enlarged, minds to be cultivated, sympathies to 
be quickened, joys to be perfected, homes to be 
brightened, fetters to be broken, and souls to be 
emancipated from the thraldom of sin and Satan. 
Pray, in the Battle of Life, for more Faith. I re- 
member reading a poem about a number of travellers 
who sat on the sea shore one evening and with 
tearful eyes and quivering lips told their losses. 
One mourned departed joys, and another a buried 
household, and another the unfulfilled hopes of 
youth, and a fourth vanished gold ; and one spake of 

" a green grave, 

Beside a foreign wave 

That made him sit so lonely on the shore. " 

But there was one who said, ''A believing heart' 
had gone from him ; and they all agreed that his 
was the greatest loss. for more faith ! Going 
up and down the land in winter time, I watched 
the thin green blades of wheat peeping through the 
cold damp earth. 

'• Small and feeble, slender and pale, 

It bent it's head to the winter gale. " 
I 



GG TTJE liATTLE 



Prcscntley it 

"Saw chosnuts biul (nit and campions Llow, 
And daisies niimic tlio vanish'd snow. " 
Tlien when spring rains liad fostered, and summer 
suns warmed, there was seed for the sower and 
bread for the great family of man. It is so in the 
moral vineyards. 

" God, my "brotliors, Avill not leave us, 
Still his heaven is o'er iis bent ; 
His commandments are not grievous, 
Do His will and be content. " 

And now Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to con- 
clude this lecture with an old proverb.. I want to 
conclude with two. One is : '' It's never too late to 
mend." The other: ''Tis never too soon to 
begin. " Never too late to mend. '' Stop a minute 
Mr. De Fraine, " I hear some one say, '' Isn't that 
a proverb for bad peojile ? I don't get drunk." Of 
course you don't. " I never use bad language." 
It would be very shameful if you did. " I pay 
twenty shillings in the pound." I almost wonder 
your neighbours don't give three cheers for you, 
seeing that such a lot of persons don't pay twenty 
shillings in the pound. But for all that, the story 
of my lecture to-night is : " It's never too late to 
mend." Are you the best man in the town ? There 
are heights to which you have never attained, and 
aspirations of the soul you have never breathed ; 
and what's the story of my lecture to-night but this ; 
" Be not weary in well doing, and remember it's 
never too late to mend." Are you the cleverest 
man ? Dr. Arnold used to say the more knowledge he 
acquired, the more it showed him his own 
ignorance. Then there are unexplored fields 
before you ; and what's the story of my lectui-e 
but this : Enter them, and remember '■'■ It's never 



OF LIFE. 67 

too late to mend." Are you an English girl striving 
to add sweetness to a sweet life by being good, and 
doing good, here in this place where you first saw 
the light, and where one day you will put down 
your tired head and die, the Battle of Life all 
over, — shall I tell you that " It's never too late to 
mend ; " and quote for you Charles Kingsley's 
beautiful words : 

*' Be good sweet maid, and let who will be clevei*. 
Do noble tilings — not dream them all day long ; 
And so make life — death — and God's vast for ever ' 
One grand sweet song." 

Have you come into this hall, a man in years, and 
you are saying to yourself : If I could have heard 
that lecture when I was a lad of eighteen, and had 
followed its teachings, to this hour, I should have 
been a happier and better man ; but it's too late now. 
Oh, say not so. During the civil war in America, 
news flew down the Slienandoah that a battle was 
nearly lost. Sheridan mounted horse, and collected 
the scattered forces, and at the eleventh hour turned 
what seemed a defeat into a victory. Oh, thou of 
the wasted life, the battle is nearly lost, but not 
quite, for you are alive, and whilst there's life there's 
hope ; and what's the story of my lecture but this : 
"It's never too late to mend". Last summer I 
went and stood on the field where a great battle had 
been fought. All down those grassy slopes the 
hostile armies had charged, and struggled, and 
fought, and wrestled in the deadly and awful grips 
of battle. There had resoun-led the shouts of the 
pm'suers, and the marclies of the victorious, and 
the wails of the dying, and the mournful moans and 
dire alarms of war; Ijut when I stood tliere, all 
was still and solemn, like the summer sea or the 
stars at midnight, A brook flowed over white 



68 TEE BATTLE 



pebbles, and a lark sang at the blue gate of heaven, 
and the beautiful grass lifted its face to the still 
more beautiful sky. I stood there all alone, and the 
aAvful memories of that spot crowded up thick and 
fast upon my brain. There at my feet blood had 
been spilt like water, and just as a few days before 
I had seen the brown fisted peasants, in the little 
villiage Avhere I live, put scythe and sickle to the 
bearded barley, so had the scythes and sickles of 
war mowed down men — the bonny and stalwart in 
the ruddy prime and bloom of their manhood. 
When I thought of those things my heart began 
to beat thick and fast ; and I said to myself ' Oh, 
poor beating heart be still. It is so ever. God 
renews the face of the earth after man's desolation. 
Hoof of war and tramp of battle, and now the daisy 
lifting up its head in modest and regal pride." So 
too God will renew your life if you turn to Him. 
Wasted, marred, soiled with sin ; yet He can make 
your last days your best days, and fill the gloaming 
of your life with the joy and beauty of " a light 
never beheld on sea or shore." Oh, to-night arise, 
and live, and bear ridicule, and work for God. 

Thoixgh tlie -world should scoru and jeer, 

Never falter — never fear ! 

If there throb within your sold 

Yearnings for the heavenly goal — 

If you are with God allied, 

Truth and mercy on yom- side, 

Then the world may scoru and jeer — 

But God wiU bless you, never fear. 

Onward, brother, pause, nor stay — 

Taint and weary by the waj- ; 

Is it now the dreary night? 

Hope for morning's golden light. 

gpurn the shams which ciu'se the years, 



OF LIFE. 

Hate the cause of woe and tears, 
Cleave to all tilings good and pure, 
Only virtue can endiire. 

Strong in faith, and brave of heart, 
Never from the right depart; 
Not for gold — nor wealth — nor fame, 
Barter freedom's hallowed name ! 
Let your thoughts for aye aspire — 
Godward — heavenward — higher ! 
Then the world may scorn and jeer. 
But God will bless you, never fear. 




^C^3 



THE 
\J X XXiZaXX. cjXXJJji 





THE 

OTHER SIDE. 



JOHN BULL, with a good deal of rougli, healthy 
y common sense, inclines to the belief that there 
? must be two sides to a question, and very often 
on looking at both, he finds that there's six to 
one and half a dozen to the other. Indeed it very 
rarely happens, in this world, that things are like the 
Bridgnorth elections — all one way ; and perhaps to 
the man we disliked so much, and the movement we 
derided so much, and the efforts we impeded so 
much, there was aside of truth and beauty, which 
in the littleness of our poor and narrow philosophy, 
we had never once dreamt about. The other side ! We 
put a laurel wreath on the brow of success : who 
cares for defeat, or thinks of the bravery with which 
it once fought, and the manful courage with which 
it once endured. We applaud the clown in the 
circus, with the paint on his cheek, and the broad 
grin on his face : who cared if his heart was sorrow- 
jPul, or would ever have thought that a painted fool, 
could have heard, through the cheers of a circus, the 
weak wails of a sick child at home. Charles Dickens 
painted for us the quick witted, rattle-brained. Cheap 
Jack : there was the other side to him, for it was the 
rough chap in a sleeved waistcoat, who raised little 
Soj)hy fi'om degradation, and brought her into com- 



76 THE OTHER SIDE. 



munication witli her kind. When that Spartan boy 
wrapped round him his cloak, nobody thought that 
a fox, on the other side was gnawlno; his vitals. 
When poor Tom Hood moved the world to such wise 
and gracious mirth, nobody ever dreamt that his 
merriest laughter was ba]:)tized with tears of living 
human pain. The other side ! Are we all like Proteus, 
capable of assuming every conceivable shape? 
There are two sides to a great many of us I fear. 
To noisy demagogues who denounce place hunting 
in high circles, but who grow fat on loaves and fishes 
filched from honest labour ; to the advertisers who 
promise you a princely income for twenty-four 
stamps, — for they diddle you out of your money ; 
to the "marvellous bargains," — especially when you 
pay three sliillings and sixpence for a fourtecn-penny 
article ; to the nice young man, the song tells us 
about, who wooed so softly, and sang so sweetly, 
and charmed the young ladies in the drawing room 
so much, — but who slipped out of the back door 
with the silver spoons in his pockets ; to the railway 
porter who shouts " now then," and pushes them in, 
and bangs the door, with a savage slam that has no 
respect for the nerves of third or second class cattle, 
— but who runs so fast, and touches his hat so politely, 
when you recline on cushions, and tip him a shilling 
from the window of a first-class carriage ; to the 
station master who ordered, in bumptous tones, tlie 
quiet, elderly gentleman at the end of the platform, 
(they said it was Lord Palmcrston) to put out his 
cigar, and not smoke there, and do it at once, and 
1)6 quick about it, — but who finding presently that 
it was really a live Lord, went, with that snobbey 
])ecular to snobs, and immediately begged his lord- 
ship's pardon. The other side ! Yesterday I saw 
tlie clouds black and stormy, but behind them there 
was the blue sky " a tiling of beauty and a joy for 



THE OTHER SIDE. 77 

ever." The hill of difficulty was hard to climb, but 
it led to the city of plenty. The race may be long 
and hot, to weary souls and fevered flesh ; but it 
may bring the gift of wealth, and the prize of name 
and* fame. Some of you men and women now 
listening to me, have, had troubles, trials, tears, 
daj^s of unutterable agony, and nights of un- 
speakable pain : there was the other side to these 
things, and a right blessed one if they heralded 
"the angel of patience," or if to one broken heart 
they brought gleams of the peace which passeth 
understanding. Some of you have had losses too. 
Oh ! how hard they were to bear, when under church- 
yard daisies you laid those who were as dear to you 
as your own life. There was the other side to that. 
Mrs. Browning brave and gifted, saw it, when she 
stood by that little child's grave at Florence, and 
under Italian skies sang : 

" Well done of God, to lialve the lot, 
And give lier all the sweetness : 
To us, the empty room and cot, — 
To her, the Heaven's completeness. 

To us, this grave — to her the rows 
The mystic palm-trees spring in, 

To us, the silence in the house, — 
To her, the choral singing. 

For her, to gladden in God's view, — 

For us, to hope and bear on ! 
Grow Lily, in thy garden new, 

Beside the rose of Sharon." 

The other side. Take loretence and vanity, — the 
other side I'll speak about in a minute. Is'nt the 
age, in which you and I live enslaved by stuck-up 
affectations ? Why here's boots wont speak to slippers ; 
and wholesale turns up it's nose at retail ; and the 
eighteen-penny folk, as might be expected, are 
giving the nine-penny three farthing ones the cold 
shoulder. Douglas Jcrrold said it was a question 



78 THE OTHER SIDE. 



of pig iron gTOwing uslianicd of teiipeiiu}' nails. A 
right note was sounded on the other side of the 
Atlantic years ago, when Enicrs(jn began to teach 
about a pride that builds up manliness and keeps the 
earth sweet. A pride that goes rusty and educMes 
tlie boy. A pride that will wear seedy cap and out- 
grown coat, that it may secure the coveted place in 
the college and the right in the library, A pride 
that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials. 
A pride that will pay off the mortgage on the 
paternal farm, give every man his due, go cheerfully 
to work, and keep its honour untarnished. But 
between that pride and modern vanity there's a very 
great gulf. Vanity likes veneer, and nickel silver, 
and purple and fine linen. Vanity gets worried 
every day of it's life by uneasy thoughts about it's 
poor relations, it's uncle the blacksmith, or it's cousin 
the besom maker. Vanity lifts men up and drops 
them down, leads to debt, and the bankruptcy 
court, and eight-jDence three-farthings in the pound ; 
and it's a long, sad, dii^ty, desolate way that ends in 
nothing but defeat to those who go down it. 
Abernethy, when he was a candidate for a vacant 
ph^'sicianshij) at St. Thomas' Hospital, went one 
morning into a rich grocer's in the Borough, who 
was one of the trustees. The grocer was a very vain 
man, and immediately he saw Abernethy, he drew 
himself up, and in a most pompous manner said: 
'' Well Mr. Abernethy, I suj^pose you have called to 
solicit my vote and interest." ''No I have'nt ,' 
Abernethy replied, ^'I've called for two penn'orth o' 
Figs — make haste and weigh 'em " ! The Rev. Mr- 
Owen, a late Eector of St. Jude's, Chelsea, used to 
tell a capital story of a vain and ignorant man who 
had acquired a great deal of money at brass founding. 
When he had amassed considerable wealth he retired 
into private life. Wlien he got there lie began to 



79 TRE OTHER SIDE. 



calHiis son ^Hlie young squire." That was with a 
view to induce folk to call him " the old squire ; " 
but it did'nt answer, and the folly met it's death blow 
at a public dinner, where a wag in proposing the 
health of the family said ; *' Here's to the old squire, 
the young squire, the squireen, and the squirt ! " 
That rather settled it ; for from that day to this, 
nothing has been heard of the young squire. Then 
you have not only social pretence and vanity, but 
intellectual pretence and vanity, which to me seems 
almost worse. There's that wonderful word " 2fe," 
and the still more wonderful one '' 7." You all re- 
member the three tailors of Tooley Street, who 
began their petition with the words : '' We the men 
of England : " When the fly got upon the wheel of 
the carriage it said : '' Bless us what a dust I do kick 
up ! " There's an old proverb that says '' Every ass 
thinks himself worthy to stand with the King's 
horses." But asses deceive themselves ; and he that's 
a donkey, and thinks himself a deer, will find out his 
mistake at the leaping of the ditch." Douglas 
Jerrold used to be much annoyed by a bumptous and 
conceited young gentleman, who would persist in 
interrupting the conversation. One night this young 
gentleman got up and waving his hand in a majestic 
manner over the meeting said : '' Gentlemen, all I 
want is common sense." '' Exactly Sir," said Douglas 
" that's precisely what you do want.'; Sheridan the 
orator, used to be troubled by a noisy and con- 
ceited member in the House of Commons, who was 
always shouting '' Hear hear." One night Sheridan 
was speaking, and describing somebody's rascality, 
and as he proceeded he grew excited and exclaimed : 
''where in all the world can you find a greater 
villian ? " '' Hear, hear " shouted the noisy and con- 
ceited member. '' Much obliged to you Sir, for the 
information" said Sheridan, and immediately sat 



TUE OTHER SIDE. 80 



cl.(jwn. Rouglior than that is the story of the farmer 
standing under the gateway of the village inn. An 
empty-headed dandy went up to him and said : 
'' some people take me for an Italian, some take me 
for a Spaniard, some for an American, remarkably 
few persons take me for an Englishman. Pray what 
do you take me for " ? "I take you for a fool " said 
the farmer. 

" wad somo jrower the giftie gie us, 
To see oursel's as others see us, 
It wad from many au erroi^ free us. 

And foolish blunder." 

And now. Ladies and Gentlemen, if you want to 
know what I believe to be the other side both of 
social pretence and intellectual vanity, it is I think 
to do, what, for years, I have in my poor way, being 
trying to do up and down this land. It is to teach 
our young men to be real, and natural, and honest, 
and earnest, God fearing, and brave, and true. It 
is to show them the majesty of earnestness : It 
is to imbue them with reverence for truth : It 
is to teach them to tread softly in presence of life's 
awful and manifold mysteries. The world docs'nt 
want soundj it wants sense : not words, but work : 
not language, but livmcf : not that our young men 
should say ani/thing, but that they should do some- 
thing. Oh, dear fi-iends who are the noblest ? Those 
who sit and sigh in easy chairs, and talk fine be- 
scented and embroidered philanthropy ; or those wlio 
follow in the footsteps of that good sister of the 
good Vicar of Preston, who sacrificed her health, 
and shattered the golden boAvl of life for ever, in 
unwearying devotion to the sick, and starving during 
that cotton famine in Lancashire years ago ? For 
my part, I believe one hour's work for God and 
humanity, to be worth a month's prating and making 
a noise in the world.. I believe devotion to be 



THE OTHER SIDE. 81 

higher tlian cant; duty to be nobler than fault 
finding; and that he will best serve this town — 
not who has the longest face, but the bravest and 
purest heart, — a soul in which the joy bells of a 
diviner existence make their music continually, 
teaching him too, to march to Tennyson's noble 
words : 

Not once or thrice in our rougli island-story, 
The path of duty was the way to glory : 
He that walks it, only thirsting 
For the right, and learns to deaden 
Love of self, before his journey closes. 
He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting 
Into glossy purples, which out-redden 
All voluptuous garden roses. 

Not once or twice in our fair island-story, 

The path of duty was the way to glory ! 

He, that ever following her commands. 

On with toil of heart, and knees, and hands. 

Thro' the long gorge to the fair light has won 

His path upward, and prevailed, 

Shall find the toppling crags of duty scaled, 

Are close upon the shining table-lands 

To which our God Himself is moon and sun. 

Instead of this many people want ism and ology, 
and fine transcendental theories, and they turn their 
backs upon common sense ; but what would common 
sense do for our young men ? Common sense would 
say : look on the bright side ; face things like a man ; 
the longest lane will turn, and the darkest night will 
broaden into heavenly day. Common sense would 
say : if you are down get up again, and go to work ; 
I can't find bread for my children said an idler in 
the market square. Neither can I replied a common 
sense miller, " I have to work for it." Common 
sense would say : do your work well, and let the 
work speak for itself I looked up into the gallery 
of our little parish church one Sunday, and I saw 
seventeen persons, fourteen of them being asleep. I 



82 THE 0TB ER SIDE. 



immediately beg-an to tliink about De:iu Ramsey's 
story, in his " Scottish Reminiscences " of the churcli 
in Scotland where the people were always asleep. 
At last a meeting of the heads of the congregation 
was held, and it was finally resolved that a number 
of siiuff boxes, on a large scale, should be fixed to 
the end of long poles, and handed over the pews, 
amongst the slee]')y ones, during the sermon ; iDut a 
common sense elder who sat in \\\g corner, and had 
kept remarkably quiet, said he thought it would be 
a much better plan if the snuff was put into the 
sermon ! And I think so too. Common sense would 
keep us from much of the idle gossip and wicked 
scandal so peculiar to certain persons and certain 
localities. If an^^body wants to start a story that's 
likely to be painful, disagi^eeable, and cutting, they 
never tell you who told them, or where they got 
their information from ; but it's always " they say ! '^ 
Theij say Mrs. Stiggins starves her servant — they sat; 
the Curate bu^^s his sermons ready made — the?/ saij 
Mr. Pump, the teetotaller ; drinks gin out of a tea 
pot — they say the beautiful Miss Violet is no better 
than she ought to be — they say that A. B. is in debt — 
and that C. D. keeps bad company — and that E. F. 
threshes his wife. Ladies and gentlemen, who are 
" they ? " The busybodies who can find so much 
time to sweep everybody else's doorway clean, and 
never five minutes to look to their own ! And 
what's the other side of all their "they" saying? 
Why just this: — 

" Oh, how hard it appears to leave others alone, 
And those -with most sin often cast the first stone ; 
What missiles we scatter, wherever we pass, 
Tliough our own walls are formed of most delicate glass! 
Faults and errors choke up like a snow storm I ween, 
But we each have a door of our own to sweep clean ; 
And t'would save us a vast many squabbles and cares, 
If we'd ti'ouble our heads with our own affairs. 



TRE OTHER SIDE. 83 

The Bro\rQS spend tiie bettermost part of the day, 
In watching the Greens who live over they way ; 
They know about this, and they know about that, 
And can tell Mr, Green when he has a new hat. 

Mrs, Brown finds that Mrs,. Green^s never at hom-e, 
Mrs, Brown doubts how Mrs. Green's money can come ; 
And Mrs. Brown's youngest child tumbles down stairs, 
Through not ts*oubling her head with her own aifairs. 

Let a symptom of wooing and wedding be found, 
And full soon, the im^pertinent "whisper goes round; 
The fortune, the beauty, the means, and the ends, 
Are all carefully weighed by our good natured friends. 

'Tis a chance if the lady is perfectly right, 

ybe must be ii tiirt, if she is not a fright; 

Oh, how pleasant 'twould be if these meddlesome bears, 

Would but troablo their heads with their own affairs! " 

But I hear speakers, on certain platforms, say that if 
you want a great or a good man you must go to the 
graveyard and dig him up. Then, on the other 
side, I hear them run up the age in which we live, 
as though it were a ladder whose top got lost in 
heaven ; and I thought I would be honest, and try 
and look at both sides. Sometimes I think the age 
has a weakness for brag. I know many persons 
who carry a great deal more money in their mouths, 
than they are ever once capable of finding in their 
pockets. I think it has a weakness for vulgar, fine 
airs — reminding one of the woman shouting " Hi, 
hi; stop that cow, man 1 " *' How dare you speak 
to me like that. I am not a man ; Pm a magistrate! " 
A weakness for small honours. Takes a trip to 
places where degrees are cheap", and comes home in 
nineteen weeks with D.D. or Si. A. at the end of its 
name. A straw hat manufacturer went to America, 
some years ago, from Bedfordshire, and returned 
home in tiiirteen weeks with M.A. at the end of his 
name. Somebody suggested that they were going to 
write manufacturer, and had'nt time to finish the 
word. A weakness, I. have before said, for troubhng 



84 THE OTHER SIDE. 

its head with other peo])le's business — especially if 
you have prospered in the world, and made money, 
longing to find out whether your father was a 
scavenger, or a bargeman ; and ransacking the 
records of, I canH tell how many generations, in 
order to find out whether your wife's mother's 
fifteenth cousin's uncle's aunt ever took in washing. 
A weakness for local prejudices and narrow antipa- 
thies. Clings to the old belief, Sam Slick said, tliat 
any Britisher, single handed, could whop three 
Frenchmen. Looks at a stranger, as much as to 
say; "I be who I be, and who be you, if you 
please." And is'nt unlike the famier's man who 
went from his native town, by an excursion train, to 
London, forty-three miles distant, at eight o'clock in 
the morning, returning at seven in the evening. 
'' Well, Thomas," his master said to him, '' how did 
you like London ? " ''Hang Lunnon, master; old 
England for me," was the reply. A weakness for 
slang words and flash talk. All the lads of seventeen 
know more, in my days, than bearded and Avrinkled 
men of seventy. But not to be too hard upon lads, 
a great many persons, who long ago passed from the 
golden days of youth, have entirely forgotten an old 
fashioned virtue that once in this world used to be 
called civility. I shall never forget what an old 
man said to me when I was a boy. He laid 
his hand on my head, and said, " John, lad, 
thee be civil, be civil, and it will be passport 
for thee through life." Now Avhen I stand on 
London Bridge about 5 o'clock in the evening, 
and see that wonderful, human life crowd sway 
and sweep there continually, I know that if 
you wish to get over you must lay a hand gently on 
a shoulder there, and stand back a second there, and 
walk quickly along in rank and file there, and 
you'll get over, and everything will go off pleasantly 



THE OTHER SIDE. 85 

enough ; but if you begin to stick out that uncivil 
bony elbow of yours, and knocli to the right and the 
left, you'll do, for a little while. A great many 
will be m a hurry, and they won't notice you at 
all. A good many will mutter that you are a 
puppy, about which symbolically speaking, I should 
think there won't be very much mistake ; but by and 
bye you'll go to the wall and the gutter, and get 
what you deserve, or I shall be very much deceived 
and disappointed. I believe snobs and bullies 
always do get — in the end — what th^y deserve. I 
read a capital story the other day about a fat 
woman who got into an omnibus in Brussels. When 
she sat down a gentleman — so called — said '' Ha-um ; 
omnibuses were'nt made to carry Elephants." "Sir," 
said the lady, '' Omnibuses are like Noah's ark, 
intended to carry all kinds of beasts." But I read 
a much better story even than that about a Counsel 
who would persist in bullying every witness who got 
into the box. One day, he said : '' My Lord, the 
witness, I shall now call forward, my Lord, is what 
I call my Lord, begging your Lordship's pardon, for 
the use of such a term in your Lordship's presence, 
half a fool my Lord." Now witness, speak up, and 
let the gentlemen of the jury hear you. Who made 
you ?" ''I dunn'o know — Moses I'spose." " Well, 
my Lord, the witness appears to have a much better 
knowledge of Scripture names than I thought he 
had." " If you please my lord," said the witness, 
may I ax the Counsellor a question '?" Permission 
having been given. " Well then — now then, said 
the witness, who made you ?" '' Oh, said the 
Counsel, Aaron, I suppose Sir, Aaron, my good Sir, 
yes certainly Sir, Aaron." " I thought so, my Lord," 
said the witness, " I knew it was coming, I knew 
we could'nt get another answer my Lord. We do 
read in the good book as how Aaron once made a 



86 THE OTUER SIDE, 

calf, but who'd a tliouglit tlie critter would ha' 
walked in here ?" A weakness for mere agitation 
and noise. Never satisfied unless its practising Sam 
Weller's advice to Mr. Pickwick when they were 
sliding, "to keep the pot a'bilin ;" and running as 
it seems to me, in the rut of setting class against 
chiss ; but if nobody else will do it, I, wherever 
God gives me the opportunity to speak, will raise my 
voice and say : Beware of setting class against class. 
Bridge over the gulfs which separate man from 
man. Let there be living links of sympathy from 
rank to rank: then all of us, rich and poor, high and 
low, old and young, should do our work in the light 
of those heavenly words in the Best Book : " the rich 
and the poor meet together, the Lord is the maker 
of them all." We should strive to roll away the weak- 
ness and wickedness of this age. Wo should make 
this land the perpetual home of freedom. We should 
should spread peace, and prosperity, and intelligence 
amongst the people ; and we should do something 
towards reviving some of that spirit of the Roman 
Empire, so eloquently chanted by Macaulay : — 

' ' Then none was for a party ; 
Then all were for the state ; 
Then the great man helped the poor, 
And the poor man loved the great ; 
Then lands were fairly portioned; 
Then spoils were fairly sold ; 
The ilomans were like brothers 
lu the brave days of old." 

But I turn that picture to the wall ; for in my own 
day 1 have seen })ublic tuoi'th as Avell as pid)lic 
weakness. I have seen two notable instances of 
heroic, self-renunciation in great public men. One 
was a Prince. He was modest, wise, retiring. He 
bore for nearly twenty years the abuse and the niis- 
lepresentation of a huge section of the British 
])eople ; and he went down to an early grave amidst 



THE OTHER SIDE. 87 



their idle tears and still more idle flatteries ; but lie 
arose, I believe, to a resurrection of eternal fame, 
and remembered for his useful life, and revered for 
his spotless character he will be thought of through 
all time as Albeit the Good. The other was a man, 
and a man only ; but he was a man in the sublimest 
acceptation of the word. He was what Virgil calls : 
" a man of humanity." He was bold, brave, lion- 
like, tender, simple, gentle as a child. I mentioned 
his name, last night, when I said that he gave a 
kingdom to a king, and with the riches of a great 
city all lying at his feet went back to his island 
home a poor man, untitled, unstarred, unbadged — 
plain Joseph Garibaldi, '' rich only in the priceless 
treasure of a nation's love, and in the glad thought 
of a great work right bravely done." The age in 
which you and I live saw the story of the good ship 
" Birkenhead." Oh never did page of history gleam 
with brighter record than the one which tells the 
story of that brave and ill-fated ship. How three 
hundred men in the pride and prime of life, stood 
on the deck or that ship — in living rank and file, — 
whilst the women and children escaped in boats to 
land, and life, and home, and safety, these waited 
with pathetic and awful patience to be engulphed 
in that hungry and dreadful gray sea. The age in 
which you and I live saw that '' thin, red-streak" 
of British valour on Balaclava's plain. The age in 
which you and I live saw the story of Grace 
Darling. Grace the young and bonny. Grace, 
whose round arms, that once pulled the boats to sea 
grew early in life so thin, and whose brave bosom 
got hacked with consumption. Is there any need 
tell the history of that brave girl : — '' Is there any 
need to repeat the beautiful story which every 
fisher-boy and North Sea sailor knows word for 
word, and which, because it is so simple and so 



88 TEE OTHER SIDE. 

dear, ilio wliolo world has ofot 1)}- rote? Not mueli 
to tell cither, beside grand campaigns and battles, 
but oh, so different, and so much better to tell ! If 
you sail or steam along the rugged northern coast 
of England — bound, sa}^, for Edinburgh or Aber- 
deen—and evening falls between Newcastle and 
Berwick, you will see a look-out kept for the Fern 
Islands light, and presently sight the dark low rocks 
and the seething sui*f on them. And then, if you 
want telling, somebody will say, " That's Grace 
Darling's lighthouse ;" and should you ask for the 
narrative, any one of the crew will play historian : 
How, on a blacker and fiercer night tlian the run of 
bad weather off this iron shore, the Forfarshire, a 
Dundee packet, laden with goods and passengers, 
mistaking the lights, struck the seaward reef; and 
how Grace and her father were tending the light, 
and heard voices calling through the darkness for 
help. And then they made out signals, and the 
gestures of j^oor forlorn cieatures all alone and 
drowning in the hungry grey sea, without a chance 
of life, unless at the risk of other lives. North-coast 
boat-men are not afraid of wet jackets, and never 
were ; but the oldest sailors shook their heads at 
those savage breakers and that howling night-wind, 
and said that the castaways must look to God's 
mercy. Yet Grace Darling, only a girl of nineteen, 
then stood up among them, and said that God's 
mercy could help the strong to aid the weak, and 
that it touched their manhood to stand by and let 
poor creatures perish without a struggle for it. 
And when her entreaties could not move the coast- 
men, terrified as even they were by the boiling 
waters, she went to her womanly weapon, and 
cried. Noble tears ! — dear tears ! — tears that glisten 
through a humble history for ever, as diamonds and 
the rest of it never can, because they came straight 



THE OTBER SIDE. 89 

out of a pure heart into gentle eyes, and fell fast 

with the sweet passion of saving tears for others ! 

One stalwart fellow, her father, couldn't stand 

Grace's tears ; ' The wench shall have her will^'' 

he said, and they launched the coble and got 

afloat and pulled clear ; the girl's arms, tugging 

stoutly at the oar. And whether He was 

abroad who made the lake-waves lie still in 

Galilee, or whether they had only luck, or whether 

the bitter storm gave over blowing for a spell, 

certainly Grace ' had her will ; ' for the coble 

reached the Forfarshire, and rounded-to under her 

lee, out of the worst of the wash, and then and there 

the Northumberland girl — God bless her ! — and her 

father, picked out of the jaws of death eight 

shivering wretches, and a woman besides — Grace's 

especial prize — whose babies were dead already in 

her lap, drenched to death in spite of the warm 

breakwater of a mother mother's bosom." That's 

the story of Grace Darling; and as long as we 

can say that the age in which we live gave 

birth to such bravery, who'll call it merely a 

beggarly and a braggart age. When God speaks 

great hearts will flash forth at His bidding. Oh, 

won't you pray that you may be true to the voice 

of duty, and strive every hour to quit yourselves 

like men. The Other Side. Take Majorities. The 

other side will be Minorities. Majorities like easy 

places and snug corners. Majorities like to be 

cockered and to eat cake. Majorities like beef, and 

porter, and brass, and mahogany. Majorities like 

smooth sailing : but rough waters teach oarsmen a 

lesson ; and William Jay, of Bath, was right : 

" Any dead fish can go with the tide, but it takes a 

live one to go against it." It's the fashion in these 

days to tickle majorities, and say fine things about 

^' the people " and '' the masses ; " but I have come 



90 THE OTHER SIDE. 

to say a word for Minorities. I trust I am not such 
a sham teacher as to come here and tell young 
people that it's an easy tiling to go with the few, 
when all their friends and companions are going 
with the many ; but for all that, the way of the few 
may be right, and the way of the many may be 
wrong ; the way of the many may lead to death and 
the way of the few may lead to life, even life eternal. 
Is it any disgi-ace to be in a minority ? There's 
hardly a privilege or blessing we enjoy to day, that 
was not bought for us by the toils and tribulations, 
the struggles and sufferings of minorities. Is it any 
disgrace to be in a minority ? In a minority ! So 
was Colmnbus when he steered for the unknown 
shores, and broke a path-way to the distant realms 
that in the earth's broad shadow lay enthralled. In 
a minority ! So were the '' Pilgrim Fathers when 
they launched the Mayflower," and were borne to 
their distant home by favouring seas and breeze. 
In a minority ! So was John Wycliffe when he pro- 
tested against laziness, as patronised by religion ; 
but to day his name is a bright memory, and in ages 
yet to come he mil be known as the " morning star 
of the Reformation." In a minority ! So was 
Martin Luther, when he stood up before principalities 
and powers exclaiming : '' here standi, and will not 
move so help me God." In a minority ! So was 
Henry Martyn, when he left the cloistered halls of 
Cambridge to labom- under the bm'ning and fatal 
sun of the east. In a minority ! So was Lloyd 
Garrison, when he toiled in a small chamber, 
friendless and unseen — 

" Yet there the Freedom of a race began." 
In a minority ! So was John Hampden, when he 
made a stand against ship money ; but that led to a 
memorable fight, and to the bringing out of a still 
more memorable man, Oliver CromweU. In a 



TME OTSER SIDE. 91 



minority ! So was John Howard, when lie began 
to visit the local prisons of Bedfordshire ; but that 
led to a '^ circumnavigation of charity " — most 
eloquently described by our great orator Edmund 
Burke. In a minority! So was that Garibaldi, 
whose name I mentioned a few minutes since, when 
he landed one morning in Sicily with a '' mere hand- 
ful of followers," but that led to the destruction of 
Bourbon tyranny and to the foundation of a great 
Italian kingdom. In a minority ! So were the first 
heralds of the Grospel. '' They were stoned, they 
were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with 
the sword : they wandered about in sheep-skins and 
goat-skins ; being destitute. afEicted, tormented ; of 
whom the world was not worthy." And all the 
great movements have been ridiculed, and noble 
enterprises were called '' Utopian," and brave hearts 
were mocked to the verge of the cold and starless 
road of death ; but our cry shall be : 

"We cannot keed tliat idle ban— 
^' Your schemes are all Utopian ! " 
By the lieart that beats within, 
We'll try Truth's farthest goal to win- 
To go where Eight alone shall lead, 
Though phalanx'd foes our path impede. 
Truths which the prophet-soul doth scan, 
Vain men mock as Utopian; 
But still he reads with flashing eye 
The bliss that waits humanity; 
Vivid the world to be is seen, 
Beyond the years that intervene.' 
Bejoice, rejoice, large-hearted man; 
Your schemes are all Utopian; 
By that brave name the world shall know 
Those bosoms that ne'er cease to glow 
With hopes and aims that shall embrace 
Whate'er can bless the human race." 

The other side. Take Fact. The other side will 
be Fancy. I don't mean the Fancy a grocer in my 
native town spoke about. A woman went into the 



92 THE OTHER SIDE. 

shop one day, and said slie wanted a pound of fresh 
butter. " There's no fresh butter in the place said 
the grocer," but half a shop full of salt ; and \i 
you'll take a pound of that, and eat it, and fancy it 
is fresh it will be all the same I can assure you. 
People come here, and they bother and pester one 
as though the shop was made of fresh butter : but I 
tell them what I tell you : if they'd take salt, and 
eat it, and fancy it was fresh, it would be all the 
same. "Well the woman said, if that was the case 
she'd have a pound of it. So she had the butter, 
and put it into her basket, and walked out of the 
shop. " Stop, stop, stop my good woman," said 
the grocer, you have'nt paid me." " No Sir, said the 
woman, fancy you're paid, its all the same I can 
assure you." Douglas Jerrold said there were some 
persons so exceedingly matter of fact, that if you 
began to talk to them about Jacob's ladder, they 
wanted immediately to know how many steps there 
were in it. They treat poetry, and fancy, and the 
finer thoughts and feelings of heart and life pretty 
much, as an old farmer in Buckinghamshire used to 
treat astronomy. His observation was : " They 
say the sun's ninety-five millions o' miles from us, 
and as how the stars and the planets ha' got people 
in em.' Well what ha' we got to do with that. 
They aint a coming here I 'spose, and we aint a 
going there, so what I says is, let 'em alone, and 
don't bother your brains about such stuff and 
nonsense." And a great many persons, I repeat, treat 
poetry, and the finer fancies of intelligence in much 
the same way. But I am going to say something 
that very few people think about, and yet I believe 
it as firmly as I believe I see this audience, about 
which I am happy to say I have not the sh'ghtest 
doubt. I believe every man's life might be rounded 
to the beauty of a poem, and these common days of 



TEE OTHER SIDE. 93 

om^s march to moral rhythm as though they kept time 
to the beat of miseen angel feet by our side. Believe 
me now, if never yet again, the greatest poet will 
be he who makes his life a poem, and sets his 
country's fate to living nmsic. And there is an 
eloquence as far surpassing that of words, as the 
lightning with vivid flash surpasses the braggart 
thunder at its heels. It is the eloquence of a brave 
and good life devoted to truth and God. I 
never think of what I have called the finer fancies 
of intelligence without two or three sweet poems 
coming into my head. They have often charmed 
and cheered me. In their way I know of nothing 
sweeter in the whole range of human speech or song ; 
and I want to repeat them because they bear upon 
the thoughts that are now running through my 
brain. Here is one by James Russell Lowell : — 

Tlie snow had begun in tlie gloaming, 

And busily all tbe night ; 
Had been heaping field and highway, 

With a silence deep and white. 

Every pine, and fir, and hemlock. 

Wore ermine too dear for an earl ; 
And the poorest twig on tlie elm tree, 

Was ridged inch deep with pearl. 

From sheds new roof'd with cararra, 

Came chanticleers muffled crow ; 
The stiff rails were softened to swansdown, 

And still fluttered down the snow. 

Then j sat and thought of a grave in sweet Auburn. 

Where a little headstone stood, 
How the flakes were folding it gently, 

As did robins the babes in the wood. 

Up spoke our own little Mabel, 

Saying "father who makes it snow;" 
Then I told of the great All-Father, 

Who cares for us all below. 

And with eyes that saw not I kissed her, 

And she, kissing back, did not know, 
That my kiss was given to her sister, 

Folded close under decp'ning snow." 



94 TBE OTHER SIDE. 

Or listen to this, by Gerald Massey, on 

POOR LITTLE WILLIE. 

Poor little Willie, 

With his many pretty wiles ; 
Worlds of wisdom in his looks, 

And quaint, quiet smiles ; 
Hair of amber, touch with 

Gold of heaven so brave ; 
All lying darkly hid 

In a Workhouse grave. 

You remember little Willie ; 

Pair and funny fellow ! he 
Sprang like a lily 

From the dirt of poverty. 
Poor little Willie ! 

Not a friend was nigh, 
When, from the cold world, 

He croucht down to die. 

In the day we wandered foodless, 

Little WiUie cried for bread ; 
In the night we wandered homeless, 

Little Willie cried for bed. 
Parted at the Workhouse door. 

Not a word we said : 
Ah, so tired was poor Willie, 

And so sweetly slept the dead. 

'Twas in the dead of winter 

We laid him in the earth ; 
The world brought in the New Year, 

On a tide of mirth. 
But, for lost little WiUie, 

Not a tear we crave ; 
Cold and Hunger cannot wake him, 

In liis Workhouse Grrave. 

We thought him beautiful, 

We felt it hard to part ; 
We loved him dutiful, 

Down, down, poor heart ! 
The storms they may beat. 

The winds they may rave, 
Little Willie feels not 

In his AVorkhouse Grrave. 

No room for little Willie 

In the world ho had no part ; 



THE OTHER SIDE. 95 

On him stand the Gorgon eye 

Through which looks no heart; 
"Come to me," said Heaven, 
" Come to me," said Heaven ; 

And if Heaven will save. 
It little matters though the door 

Be a Workhouse Grrave. 

And if these are so ricli in pathos and tenderness, 
how full of meaning is, this by Longfellow — 

THE SINGEES. 

God sent His Singers upon earth 
With songs of sadness and of mirth. 
That they might touch the hearts of men, 
And bring them back to Heaven again. 

The first, a youth, with soul of fire, 

Held in his hand a golden lyre ; 

Through groves he wandered, and by streams, 

Playing the music of our dreams. 

The second, with a bearded face, 
Stood singing in the market place. 
And stirred with accents deep and loud 
The hearts of all the listening crowd. 

A gray, old man, the third and last, 
Sang in cathedi-als dim and vast, 
While the majestic organ rolled 
Contrition from its mouths of gold. 

And those who heard the Singers three 
Disputed which the best might be; 
For still their music seemed to start 
Discordant echoes in each heart. 

But the great Master said, "I see 

No best in kind but in degree ; 

I gave a various gift to each, 

To charm, to strengthen, and to teach. 

"These are the three great chords of might, 
And he whose ear is turned aright 
Will hear no discord in the three. 
But the most perfect harmony." 

I go to London to lecture ; and when I get there I 
see wealth, life, excitement, gaiety, magnificent 
houses, gaudy temples of trade, the equipages of 
the proudest and noblest families in Europe. What 



9G THE OTUEU SIDE. 

of the otlicr side? Dives fares sumptuously every 
day — j)0(,)i' Lazarus lias'nt a crunilj to a})pease the 
cravings of liunger. Tlie high-born beauty will 
go past me in gleam of satin and glitter of pearl — 
yonder her poor sister, shivering on tlie pavement, 
will beg tAvopence of the stray passer-by, or peering 
over the bridges that sjoan the river, will think how 
pleasant a grave she might find under that dark, 
and coldly rippling water. Your little children will 
sleep under snow white coverlets, and will be kissed 
to sweet slumbers by the fondest lips the earth ever 
gives to us — but there, in many a haunt of wretched- 
ness, they will hide away from the brutality of gin- 
drinking parents, and sleep in holes and corners 
where I would not let my dog lie. But why go to 
London when I am in the country ? "\¥liy think of 
Middlesex when perhaps I am so far away from it ? 
Is there no other side to life even in small town or 
secluded village ? I go often to lovely spots. The 
other day I was in Cumberland, and I climbed an 
eminence, and saw a most glorious sight. Oh, it 
was beautiful : — gliding river and grassy field, the 
bannered j^omp of woods, and the lakes sleeping in 
beauty under the shadow of the evarlasting hills ; 
at my feet the golden gorse that Linnaeus loved so 
well, and above my head the bended heavens in 
their olden splendour, and far away on the horizon's 
rim, the shining sea. I looked at it till I got 
humming to myself — for I could not help it — those 
sweet words of a true poet : — 

" Our TTorld is full of beauty, 
Like other world's above ; 
And if we did our duty, 
It might be full of love. 

The leaf tongues of the forest, 

The flower lips of the sod, 

The happy birds that hymn their rapture 

In tlie ear of God. 



THE OTHER SIDE. 97 



The summer wind that waffceth music, 
Over land and sea, 

Have all one voice ; it singeth that sweet 
Song of songs to me : 

Our world is full of beauty, 
Like other worlds above ; 
And if we did our duty, 
It might be full of love. 

That word "duty" I have been trying to keep 
before our young people. Indeed, wherever I have 
gone to speak I have tried to do two things. I 
have tried to put a clearer thought into the head, 
and a tenderer feeling into the heart. That 
morning when I stood amid the Cumberland hills, 
I saw something — far away in the distance — looking 
very bright. It shone like silver in the autumn 
sunlight, and when I got nearer it was a little rill. 
It was very small, but the water went pattering 
merrily over the white stones — on, and on, and 
on — into the green fields below, where it gained 
force and strength — on and on — a brook, twisting 
and chattering through the valleys — on and on, 
till it grew to be a river, and at last it became part 
of the ever sounding sea. That's your life and 
mine, poor men. A little rill it may be, leaping 
up amidst mountains of difficulty, poverty, temp- 
tation, care, hard work, sore struggles for the bread 
which perisheth ; but if the sunshine of God's blessing 
be upon it, that poor life of thine shall flashback living 
beauty — thou too shalt know the dignity of labour, 
the joy of well doing, the glory of being a true man, 
and the bliss that awaits those whose days go on 
to the boundless ocean of immortality. A clearer 
thought in the head, and a tenderer feeling in the 
heart. I want you to feel for sorrow and suffering. 
Man}^ of you are young and happy, and you know 
little of the world's wretchedness and misery ; and 
yet there is work even for you, for there is work 
for all. M 



98 THE OTHER SIDE. 



" There is work for all in this world of ours — 
Ho ! idle dreamers in sunny bowers ! 
Ho ! giddy triflers with time and health ! 
Ho ! covetous hoarders of golden wealth I 
There is work for each, there is work for all, 
In the peasant's cot, in the noble's hall ; 
There is work for the wise and eloquent tongue. 
There is work for the old, there is work for the young ; 
There is work that tasks manhood's strengthed zeal, 
For his nation's welfare, his country's weal ; 
There is work that asks woman's gentle hand, 
Her pitying eye, and her accents bland ; 
From the uttermost bounds of this earthly ball 
Is heard the loud cry, ' There is work for all.' 
Look at our brethren toiling- in chains. 
There is work for all while a slave remains; 
Think of the waste of human life, 
In the deadly scenes of the battle strife ; 
Gaze on the drunkard's wife and child, 
List to his ravings so fierce and wild ; 
Look on the gibbet with shuddering eye. 
As the place where a fellow man may die ; 
Think on the felon in dungeon dim, 
He is thy brother : go, work for him ; 
Look on the outcast from virtue's pale, 
Pity thy sister though erring and frail ; 
Visit the widow, the orphan, the old, 
"When the wind blows keen, and the nights are cold ; 
Think of the poor, in their low estate — 
The toiling poor, who make nations great ; 
Think of the sick, as they helpless lie ; 
Think of the maniac's frenzied eye : 
And remember the grave, with its long repose, 
"Which " no work, nor device, nor wisdom knows." 
Let the motive be piire, and the aim be right : 
"What thy hand finds to do, do with thy might ; 
For, from every clime on this earthly ball 
Is heard the loud cry, * There is work for aU.' " 

Go down with me for a few minutes to the sea 
shore. There's a vessel about to start on a journey. 
Let's fancy its a summer clay — the sky all blue and 
clear — the sunbeams dancing like gold dust upon 
the rippling water. Colonics flying, music on deck, 
mother's kissing their boys, it may be, for the last 
time in the world ; strong men choking back the 



TEE OTHER SIDE. 93 

tears they do not like to show. Forward, amidst 
shouts and hurrahs, rides the vessel on its journey 
over the mighty deep. Gro down in two or three 
years' time. There's something coming over that 
white world of waters. You get a glass and look 
at it. It's no bigger than a man's hand. It comes 
on and on, and presently you see white sails 
flapping in the wind, as clean as any linen. 
Nearer and nearer. Closer and closer. Why, 
its the vessel that went out years ago. Oh, 
what journeyings it has had. When it dipped 
down into the trough of the sea, and rose again 
upon its storm kissed billows ; when with the hurly 
burly there came the very shadow of death ; when 
in every glassy wave the mariners saw wife and 
children's faces, and dreamt of home, and never 
thought to reach it. The masts were split, the 
sails were rent and torn, the vessel's sides were 
bruised and blackened ; and now storms and 
tempests over, they have come to the haven ; they 
are home, home at last. I always think that's like 
the life of a young man. I never see a lad start out 
in the world, but I think of it. Sometimes I picture 
life as a battle. To-night I dream of it as an ocean. 
And oh, when a youth starts out on that ocean, how 
fair, and bright, and bonny, and beautiful do all 
things look. The sky has no cloud, the earth wears 
no frown, the sea is clothed in glory. Friends clap 
their hands^ and say it's a fair day. They say he's 
young, and brave, and clever, and gifted, and 
handsome. They say he'll naake money, succeed 
in trade, prosper in business, adorn his profession, 
and be remembered with pride, through tears, when 
at last he sleeps under daisied mound or glassy 
wave. Forward rides that little vessel upon the 
ocean of life. I see something coming. It's a 
cloud no bigger than a man's hand ; but by and bye 



100 THE OTHER SIDE. 

it will cover all that fair blue of heaven. It's the 
first storm of temptation, when you will be tempted 
to pai-t with every principle that you were taught 
at a mother's knee to hold as a sacred thing. Now 
then, lads and young men, these are my last words 
to you : If into that little barque of yours you will 
take tnith, righteousness, temperance, trust in God, 
and faith in His dear Son, you will cut through 
every wave, and ride over every billow, and at last, 
I believe, you will go home to receive the crown to 
victors due. 




EXTEACTS FEOM ADDRESSES 

ON 
VAEIOUS SUBJECTS 




J^^^^ 




WOBDS TO LABS. 

:o: 

f WANT you lads to work and think. Some 
1$. people get tlieir thinking — like their washing— 
1^ done out ; but I want you to think for your- 
selves. You have a head on your shoulders ; get 
something into it. Don't be a machine ; be a man. 
Dont be content merely to eat, and drink, and 
•sleep, vegetating like a cabbage, and having no 
more intellectual life than the clods upon which you 
walk. Improve your mind. Know sovnething of 
what goes on in the busy world around you. Be 
civil, and polite, and obliging ; kind to little 
children, and tender to aged people. Use your 
spare moments. Cultivate your talents. Keep out 
of the beer shop. Grive your hearts to Grod ; and 
go forth to fight manfully the battle of life which 
lies before you. 



N 



OLD CLOTHES. 
:o: 

■fJAVE the courage to speak to a man, though his 
4$ coat is worn and shabby. Don't laugh at the 
^^ scanty garments of the poor. There is a song 
which says : ' ' Judge not a man by the cost of his 
clothing." Old Clothes are sometimes made sacred 
by carefulness and long sacrifices. The girl who 
can wear an old bonnet, and wear it graceMly and 
smilingly, will carry many of her little crosses 
cheerfully through life. Brave hearts often beat 
under old jackets. Pierce the wrappage, and 
honour the man. The shabbiest coat to me is the 
fine broadcloth one that people never mean to 
pay for. 



MOONLIGHT. 



flTTINGr by the fire, and musing over past 
times, I got strangely from one subject to 
another, till I began thinking about moon- 
light. About moonlight nights, with their memo- 
ries sweet and sad, written upon my heart to last 
as long as life. The fair form of nature seems 
often to intensify human emotion, so that when 
my face lights up with thoughts of boyish laughter, 
or grows sad with thoughts of youthful tears, I 
remember how the glistening stars did shine with 
unspeakable beauty, and the old moon flung its 
" girdle of glory " over the scenes now moving 
through my brain. 

Moonlight. 

Schoolboys coming home from a summer pic- 
nic. The night hushed, and calm, and still. All 
the hedgerows fragrant with perfume. Every pond 
and brook flashing like silver. The still air made 
vocal with merry voices. Gay laughter floating 
like music over the green meadows. Every little 
heart happy. Every little face flushed with health. 
Such stories for mother, and sisters, and dear friends. 
Then good night, and light dreams, such as child- 
hood only knows. 

Moonlight. 

Over the stormy sea. The wind whistling in 
fury, and the glassy waves rolling and surging as 
in wild anger. The moon breaking with a saint- 
like smile through the rifted clouds. Still over the 
sea. Helpless upon deck. Weary and worn, sick 
at heart, and longing for " Home, sweet home." 
Moonlight. 

Asleep ! dreaming the happy dreams of youth — 
then a sense of weeping and confusion— then a 
choking voice exclaiming: ''John! John! your 
dear mother's dead !" Ah me ! that night can 



lunci- ho tbrootteii, nor how I inn for one whose 

pyes closed only the other day, in the last long 

sleep, and who nas followed our mother " into the 

silent land." Oh ! to grow into young manhood, 

the temptations of life coming, and the dear one 

gone who would have soothed with her affection, 

and blessed with her prayers. There is no helper 

then but the Heavenly one. No true friend but 

Him whose burden is easy, and whose yoke is light. 

" Tliou, who driest tlie mourner's tear, 
How dark this Avorld would be. 
If, AA'hen deceived and wounded here, 
We could not fly to Thee." 

3foonUghf. 

In a quiet village — often round the old chui'ch, 
and over green meadows — talking of the future — 
talking, too, of the past. Our hearts beating with 
hope — our souls bouyant with love. Her face 
growing dearer day by day. Her face ? The face 
of one who has become the light of my home, and 
the ''good angel of my pilgrimage." 

Moonlight. 

In the great city. Knowing, alas ! what sad 
scenes do nightly go on under those pale beams. 
How they shine upon the haunts of wretchedness — 
upon bruised souls weary of life — upon white-faced 
women, w^atching for the drunkard's return ; upon 
sick beds, where fever's parched lips are unmoistened, 
and the poor sufferer passes away, uncared for and 
unloved : how they penetrate the feculent haunts of 
iniquity, where vice holds its carnival and excess 
runs riot — where things pure and lovely are un- 
known, where all the tastes are vicious and debasing. 
Thinking of this, let those who labour to uplift 
humanity toil on ; let all who strive to do good take 
heart again ; and, working and waiting, pray that 
in God's own time the sunshine may smile upon 
happier homes, and the queenly moon look down 
upon a purified and exalted humanity. 



SUCCESS AND ur.ri^,^^. 

:o: 

^OW much we think of Success. Look at the 
W worship of bank and ledger— the idolatry of 
^ the shop — the thirst for gold, burning up some- 
times what is truest and tenderest in the heart. Oh, 
if mere success in money making is to be honoured you 
will crown Croesus and forget Solon ; you will bow 
down to millionaires, and think nothing of Milton's 
and Shakespeare's ; and your soap boilers, and pickle 
makers, who have grown rich in a night, will be 
greater than your students of science and your 
teachers of the righteousness which exalteth a 
nation. The world applauds success, but is there 
no bravery in defeat? Pioneers of civilization 
returning baffled and disheartened— dreamers of 
golden dreams who missed the distant El Dorados- 
struggling nations, fighting for liberty, spurned and 
crushed by the heel of the tyrant— defenders of the 
truth scourged and crucified — 

"The slaughtered saints whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold." 

No bravery in defeat? A few years ago there 
sailed from Plymouth harbour a stately ship called 
the " London," and the story of its fearful end 
subdued us all to tears. Oh, sirs, was there no 
bravery in that awful defeat in the stormy Bay of 
Biscay ? Husband, and wife, and children waiting 
patiently for death — courageous women standing 
bare-headed in the storm — the stalwart actor, who 
has faced death on many a mimic stage, playing his 
last tragedy in no imaginary '^ Tempest "—that 
gallant and noble-hearted Captain, four days and 
four nights without sleep, choosing to die with his 
passengers rather than leave them ! England will 
remember, with pride, for many a long'^year the 
brave and devoted Captain John Martin. 



BE UP AND DOING. 



tILL life with good deeds. Christ bids us work 

"to-day." The cries of the perishing, and the 

^ needs ot our own life bid us : ''be up and 

doing." 

" Lo here hath, been dawning 
Another blue day; 
Think, wilt thou let it 
Slip useless slw&j. 

** Out of eternity 

This new day was born ; 
Into eternity 

This night will return. 

** Behold it aforetime 
No eye ever did : 
So socn it for ever 
From all eyes is hid. 

" Lo here hath been dawning 
Another blue day ; 
Think, wilt thou let it 
Slip useless away." 



A WORD TO CHEER. 



-:o: 



If you have hushed one cry of despair, or comforted 
one bowed and broken spirit, or given soft and 
tender thoughts to the stony heart that once warred 
against all flesh, or won the blessing of one ready to 
perish, or smoothed a furrow from the cheek of care, 
or wiped away the tears of the motherless child, or 
going into abodes of poverty, have made the hungry 
rejoice ; or, sitting by the bed of pain and affliction, 
have thrown rays of heavenl}' light down the '' cold 
and starless road of death;" then you will have 
added to the worth of the age ; and brought to youj, 
own life the music of David's words : — " Blessed is 
he that considered the poo?' ; the Lord will deliver him in 
the time of trouble,'''' 



SIN AND SORROW. 

:o: 

Sin begets sorrow. It is the moral miasma poison- 
ing the sweet currents of human life. Our vices not 
only enslave, but they spread miseiy, and tears, and 
heart-break all through the world. A woman went 
before a London magistrate some time since. She 
said she had been married fourteen years to a 
drunken husband ! Fourteen years of what? Life, 
joy, happiness ? No, they were years of pain and 
suffering, and bruises to the body, but much worse 
bruises to the soul be sure. I sat down and cried 
when I read that newspaj^er account of a poor 
woman in Suffolk, holding the head of her drunken 
husband in her lap — till he died in the cold dreary 
darkness of a cart-shed. God help these drunkard's 
wives ! The man was tij^sy in a public house. He 
was induced for a wager to drink half-a-gallon of 
beer in two minutes, after which he was dragged 
sick and senseless to a cart-shed, and left there. 
Hither came his wife, to hear his death-gurgle in the 
darkness, not a human friend or helper near to 
soothe her desolation, or breathe a word of comfort 
to her breaking heart. God help these drunkard's 
wives ! I am overwhelmed when I think of their 
sufferings. I have no words to describe their 
sorrows. We meet them every day ! Pale, weary, 
sad-faced looking women with rings of care round 
their eyes, and in their hearts such a weight of 
agony, they are ready nearly to curse God and die. 
And these are they who had flushes of beauty upon 
their cheeks once ; and were " wooed and won " in 
English homes ; and with the love of their girlish 
natm'cs dreamt of long years full of happiness and 
peace. But the reality is misery, and tears, and 
blows, and bloodshed. Oh, that sad word " blows." 
Charles Dickens somewhere finishes a chapter about 
it, and says : — '' Out with the truth upon the base 



soul'd villian — he struck her ! She only cluDg 
round him and cried how could he — could he — could 
he, and then her voice lost utterance in sobs." " O 
woman, God beloved in Old Jerusalem, the best 
among us need deal but lightly with thy faults, be- 
cause of the heavy punishment thy nature bears 
when thou risest up in judgment against us," 



A VILLAGE FAIR. 



Tlic village fair commenced on Saturday, and even 
now, three days after, the red-faced lads and lasses 
are cr(jwding round the stalls, and the sound of the 
big" drum comes incessantly to my ear. It is some 
years since I saw anything like it. In a little 
l)add()('k the stalls are built, and the great booth 
])itchcd, and the fun, and din, roar goes on as in a 
town ; only there are features we can never see in 
the crowded street or busy square. For the hedges 
all round are like emerald — and the scent of the 
clover iiclds is as sweet as a garden posy — and the 
mowers are whetting their scythes in the next 
])asture — and up above the canvass of garish stall, 
and nois}- dancing tent, the lark is soaring, and still 
sending down waves of delicious music to the heed- 
less throng beneath. The village fair is much like 
other fairs. The stalls are those of our boyhood, 
with gilded gingerbread, and wheels of fortune, and 
an infinite variety of toys, in front of which the 
children are making eyes almost as large as saucers, 
and chattering, as I heard one of their mothers say, 
"twenty to the dozen." There is a collection of 
w^axwork fiigures, including the finding of Moses in 
the bulrushes, and the death of Napoleon at St. 
Helena; a wonderful pony dancing " Pop goes the 
Weasel," and telling the rustics which one broke 
into the orchard, or robbed his grandmother's sugar 
pot ; a faded and tattered show, from which the 
light of other days has dejjarted — that trembled and 
shook like an aspen, from the stage of which a dirty 
woman was perpetually beating a gong, and a 
wheezy clown constantly announcing a variety of 
*' comic and sentimental " performances within ; 
wheels of fortune, swing boats, and wooden horses ; 
ballad singers warning the young men not to " kiss 
the girls at Feast or Fair," and to another song 
shouting the chorus-^ 

"She was as beautiful as a butterfly, 
As proud as a queen, 



Was protij little PolJy Perkius 
Of Paddington areeu." 

PliotogTa])hic '' artists " guaranteeing a perfect like- 
ness in five minutes for sixpence; skittle players, 
full of noise ; the great dancing booth crowded, 
where, if the toes were neither '' light nor fantastic," 
they pattered and stamped unceasingly ; the faces 
of John and Jane flushed with drink and excitement. 
In all the fair there was only one sight which made 
me glad ; but there were many which made me sad 
and miserable. It was a glad sight to see the young 
merry and joyous — made happy with a few pence — 
running Iiere and there, full of life and glee — buy- 
ing a doll, or a whistlC;, or a penny trumpet — hang- 
ing to father's hand, and clinging to mother's dress, 
with checks ruddy, and eyes bright. Who amongst 
all this crowd will enjoy themselves so much to-day, 
sleep so sweetly to-night, and wake so light-hearted 
to-morrow morning ? Not those m_en, surely, whose 
mouths arc foul with low language, who cannot see 
beyond a quart pot, and whose lives seem so often 
given up to beastly drinking and their own degra- 
dation. They will spend pounds, and not enjo}^ 
themselves in the end like tliose who don't spend a 
penny. There was hardly a man with any inner 
sources of enjoyment. Will it always be so ? Will 
the day never come when they sIieJI have better 
amusements presented to them — when they shall 
yearn for a healthier life ? Will they never have an 
ambition, or one desire to 

"Peer into the future, far as human e\^e can see?' 

Will they never be lifted above tJie slavery of beer, 
and the companionship of the tap-room ? The 
coming years will tell us ; but if the answer is to be 
yes^ we must think of the poor as men^ not machines 
— we must reduce to daily practice what Judge 
Talfourd's tongue spoke of when it trembled in 
death on the Stafford Bench — we must have more 
sympathy, and, trusting in God, we must never 
grow weary in well-doing. 



LET US WOKK. 

Let us work for humanity and God. Let us work 
to make tlie world happier and better. Let us^ 
''learn to labour and to wait." Let us work to 
make our own life bright and beautiful. Let us 
work for the Saviom-. Let us work and sing. Sing 
in the words of that glorious psalm, chanted by 
Scottish martyrs and heroes : — 

** That man who, bearing precious seed, 
In going forth doth movu-n, 
He doubtless bringing back liis sheaves, 
Rejoicing shall return." 

Yes, work and sing- — sing and sow, 

"Sow with a generous hand; 

Pause not for toil awl pain; 
Weary not through the heat of summer 

Weary not through the cold spring rain j 
But wait till the autumn comes 

For the sheaves of golden grain. 
*'Sow; while the seeds are lying 

In the warm earth's bosom, weep, 
If your warm tears fall upon it — 

They will stir in their quiet sleep ; 
And the green blades rise the quicker. 

Perchance, for the tears you weep. 
** Sow : — for the hours are fleeing, 

And the seed must fall to-day; 
Oh, care not what hand shall reap it. 

Or if you have passed away 
Before the waving corn-fields 

Shall gladden the sunny day. 
*' Sow ; and look onward, upward, 

Where the starry light appears — 
Wlien, in spite of the coward's doubting. 

Or your own heart's trembling fears, 
You shall reap in joy the hai'vest 

You have sown to-day in tears. 



WHAT SHALL WE GIVE. 



SIVE Knowledge, so that the old dark places of 
ignorance, and cruelty, and superstition, may 
^ be illumined witli the dawn of intelligence, ancl 
the light of wisdom : 

Give Gold, so that the famished may be fed and 
starvation no more, with its livid and awful counten- 
ance, beat out the feeble life of men and women 
made in God's own image : 

Give Teuth, so that the long black night of error 
may die away ; so that the darkness of the land 
may be rung out; so that falsehood and bigotry 
may be buried in the grave of infamy, and the 
spirit of virtue lift us all to the " common love of 
good " : 

Give Love, — comprehensive love, love large 
enough to enfold all men as brothers, tender and 
unresting love, that will seek and search till there 
be joy over the sheep that was lost and is found, and 
over the son that was dead and is alive again : 

Give Kind Woeds, so that the weak may be 
strengthened, so that the tempted may become more 
than conquerors, so that the wails of woe and the 
wrinkles of human sorrow may be hushed into rest, 
and smoothed into smiles of the ''peace which 
passeth understanding :" 

Give energy, give thought, give prayer, give 
" living epistleship," give the Gospel, so that every 
joy may be perfected, every duty be hallowed, 
every godly enterprize be jjrospered, every home be 
made happy, every man become free ! 

' ' Oh ! there is Avork to do 
In England yet, and royal work for you. 

Vif :5=- i;. ,Y- 

Much bitter life wants sweetening with the balms 

That you can bring ; much need of more than alms ! 

In eyes wide open souls lie fast asleep, 

With daylight on the face hearts darkly weep ; 

Our world hay many a AA'ard where wounds and wails 



Cry for a thousaud Florence Nightingales. 

"I know that kiiowhulge through our laud doth trail 

AVith slow illumiuation of a snail ! 

But still we dream of some bright, better day, 

And while we sleep the groat Dawn comes our way. 

* « « -A- 

" Oh they shall bless you doAA'n in pit and den ; 
Transforming slowly into women and men ! 
And smile, as leaves outsmile in first spring hours, 
With livelier green, while fall the singing showers." 

* * * * 




AT A FREE TEA AND ENTERTAINMENT 

Given to the poor of West Wickham. 



I am very glad to see you here, looking so 
happy and enjoying yourselves so much. We have 
had many joyous meetings before, but I do not re- 
member one so delightful as the present. I'll tell 
you how we came to think of these gatherings at 
all. Ten years ago, when we came to live at the 
Vicarage, my friends kept saying to me : Now, 
John, you must give a house warming. So one day 
I said to my wife, " We'll give a free tea to all the 
poor women of the place." We did so, and although 
ten years have passed away, I remember that 
meeting distinctly. Ever since then we have had 
an annual treat of this kind, inviting all our poor 
neighbours to come and join us at this festive and 
happy season. The other night when we formed 
our Sick Benefit Club, you stood up and gave me 
three cheers ; ^but when you gave three for my dear 
wife, you touched a deeper chord in my heart, for 
she has always sympathised with my plans, and 
worked to carry them out, and without her co- 
operation I could not give such charming entertain- 
ments as these. I have much faith in such meetings. 
I believe they do great "good. I am sure they give 
healthier desires and better tastes. A lady said to 
me the other day, '' Do you think the poor man 
wants any taste ? " " On yes," is vlij reply, *' he 
may have a taste only for that which degrades — a 
taste only for the pipe and pot — a taste only for that 
which sears the heart and debauches the intelligence ; 
but I long to see him have a taste for the manly and 
the good ; and just as I have seen the flowers bud 
and blossom into beauty outside his cottage door, so 
may the flowers of love, and peace, and purity, and 
gentleness, and temperance bloom in his heart, and 
throw their fragrance around his own fireside." 



Oil, my friends and neiglibours, cultivate a taste for 
better things. Strive to be good labourers — good 
servants — good sons — good husbands — good fathers'. 
Give your hearts to God. I look around this hall, 
and old familiar faces are missing. They were with 
us last yvav ; but now they have gone home ! Home 
to rest, and heaven, and God. Let us tread softly, 
and walk humbly, let us be watchful and prayerful, 
let us try to do all the good we can, let us seek to 
extend the Redeemer's Kingdom, let us commit our 
way unto the Lord — then, when all oui work is over, 
and our earthly joys and sorrows are ended, we too 
shall doubtless go home to '' the rest which remain- 
eth for the people of God." 



Jf 



